Room setup - Introduction
Room setup - Introduction
Already when this blog started, I wrote about the Personal Desk project. The concept of this project has completely changed since then and I have merged this project to represent the whole setup of my bedroom at home. This primarily considers the technical setup of the room, as well as some special features of the furniture.
Original idea
The original idea of the Personal Desk project was to build my own desk from scratch for which I had support to cut and build the primary parts from a few people. The desk should have spanned the whole area along the same wall, where my current desk setup is positioned. One part of it should have been able to be lifted and be equipped with a lot of technical stuff like automated lighting and integrated sockets for power, Ethernet and USB. But the reason I changed was the fact, that I will only live for the duration of my apprenticeship in this commune, which would have been a quite large setup and allot of work to realize this, without knowing where I will move in the future after my apprenticeship.
Maybe when I moved out, we could go into a project like this, where we build a desk from scratch...
Parts
This project will be divided into multiple parts, which will be released as posts during the development. The following lists an overview of the parts, but they may also get changed during the project.
Automated height-adjustable desk
I recently bought a height-adjustable desk with a crank to rise or lower the surface by hand. My intention is, to build a mechanism to do this with a motor. Maybe we also implement some additional features like endstops, distance sensor (to dial in the desired height) and in future (not related to this part) a nice little web interface to control it.
Lighting
A small part, but I have the intention to light the wall behind my desk, integrate backlight for my monitors and separate lights for my work surface. I want to be able to control them all with a microcontroller.
Automation
I have button controlled shutters in my room. I would like to add a relay to them and maybe the light switches to also control them with a microcontroller.
Cable management
Sounds boring, but I also got some great ideas to make this more interesting with some 3D printed parts to manage the cables behind my desks.
Automation Infrastructure
Creation of a web interface and maybe some programming of the microcontrollers to control lighting, computer and peripherals in my room.
More...
There are a few more things which I will post about, like the setup of the entertainment system (TV & Sound) and some additional furniture. Even when the project will be considered as finished, I already have a few ideas in mind, how to further upgrade some things.
Current Status
I have already started a few things and will also show off the current setup in my room.
Furniture
An overview of the current furniture in my room, which is related to this project.
Primary desk
The desk I just recently got from IKEA, which is a height-adjustable desk with a crank to rise or lower the desk surface by hand. This desk will be used for to perform my work on the computer with three monitors (which will also be upgraded in a part of this project).
Computer bench
The computer bench are basically two stacked TV benches from IKEA. My current workstation is placed on top of it with a monitor, mouse and keyboard to control my host system and manage virtual machines. I also intend to place other peripherals on this bench (e.g. printer).
Secondary desk
The secondary desk was already in this room when I moved in. I want to use it as secondary work surface like now for all the electronics in this project. In the picture is a small piece of blue tape (usually used for 3D printing, but also useful to mark things) where I intend to place the TV.
Shelf
I'm using the black shelf to place electronics inside. Additionally my router is placed on top of it directed towards the closest LTE antenna for optimal bandwidth.
Cabling
This will also be one of the first things which I do. I plan to make a few cables myself (Ethernet, USB and Power). I have already started with modelling some parts which I want to use for the cable management.
Software
The software part will become a bit difficult, since I also want to build a web interface around it. This will also be one of the starting parts of this Project.
Future and related projects
Some ideas for the future of this project and related planned projects.
New computer
I'm planning to build a new computer setup, which I will feature on this blog. But this will be towards end of 2018 or mid 2019. The intended setup will also feature virtualized systems like my current with QEMU KVM using PCI passthrough. This allows me to use different linux distros where I currently use Arch Linux for software development, Ubuntu for modelling and slicing (for my 3D printer) and Windows 10 for gaming. I would also like to implement the control of the virtualized system over the web interface I already mentioned to control the electronics in my room.
Networking
Something I have barely any knowledge of... But I intend to setup a new network infrastructure with this project and get into setting up some services for my local network and also try out other things like VPN and I've read that it would be possible to combine another network with a gateway, since I would like to have direct access to my Google Cloud Servers, as if they were in my local network.
VMBox
A project idea, but more related to my new computer setup. I intend to build mini-computers in custom enclosures to set them up in different rooms in our commune. I want to use them to connect to a virtual system running on my host, to use the full power of my system in my local network. This would be especially useful for my 3D printer, since currently I always need to run one floor up, when I want to slice models to print. I would also provide them to some of my flatmates, which are for example involved in projects with me to use them as workstations.
Monitor mount
This will probably come with the new computer. I'm still waiting for the release of a 120Hz 4K monitor, which I want to use as primary (center) monitor on my primary desk. As soon as I have one, I want to make a custom monitor mount, attached to my desk which will of course consist of 3D printed parts.
At the moment I'm working on the mechanism (gears) for the automation of the height-adjustable desk. Next to that I'm also figuring out how to share data between microcontrollers, since I want to use multiple ones in the same set up (primarily arduinos and one Raspberry to control them). I will also publish a few small independent projects, which are mostly related to microcontrollers, with things I need for this project.
Thank you for visiting my blog and reading this post. If there are any questions or opinions you like to share, feel free to write a comment on this post or over my various social media channels.
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12018-05-16T10:00Z HE - Roger "Equah" Hürzeler
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