Chair Open

How great is this? Whatever computing you want to do, you can do it from the comfort of the recliner.

Notable Features

Among the notable features are:

• The 7Flex arm makes this all possible. It has a 24″ reach, which is just enough to put the monitor directly in front of the recliner with enough room to reach the handle to open the leg rest. It goes together easily and is high quality and sturdy. And affordable at $250.
• The computer is the recent Gaming Desktop from Cyberpower. The case is admittedly larger than required for this application. My Bad. A mid-tower would have done nicely to hold the Core-i7 950 with the single Nvidia 470 graphics card. This graphics card is plenty to run Wow in style. No need for SLI for Wow.
• A 20″ Acer LED back-lit monitor is very slim [ 3/4" ] and light. Although the arm is happy with as much as 12 lbs, this monitor is only 6.2 lbs. At $100 on sale at Newegg, the monitor is great, and cheap. 1600×900 resolution is plenty for gaming.
• The Logitech K800 Wireless Lighted Keyboard. So you can work / battle with the lights down and still see the keyboard. The keyboard is so smart that it lights up when you move your hand over the keys and dims to save batteries when you move your hand away. It’s just great.
• The house is now wired with two additional Ethernet cables and this one is a Gigi-bit connection back to the router. Not all the connections in the house are Gigi-bit but the two desktop machines are connected at GB speeds.
• A 2+1 Sound system with the speakers strapped to the TV Rear speaker stands behind the chair and the sub-woofer in the cabinet above the UPS. UPS is required in my area due to frequent power glitches that would cause reboots.
• A Cyber Snipa gaming keypad – wired – under my left hand for hours of World of Warcraft fun.
• I made the cabinet from 3/4″ plywood – 1/2 sheet is required – with 1/2″ for the baffles / stiffeners front and back. Luan plywood gives the cabinet a mahogany look. The edges are finished with iron-on tape, and the cabinet is finished with several coats of marine grade poly urethane varnish.

The battle chair is everything that I hoped. I no longer have to overheat my laptop playing games. I may not buy another laptop ever. My next portable purchase may be a tablet.

More Photos

Front View

When used for gaming, laptops tend to over heat, and eventually they destroy their video cards. My Alienware m15x laptop, while it seems to have good cooling, has had 4 new video cards in the last 3 years. I have wanted to use a desktop for gaming, but prefer to do most of my playing from the comfort of my recliner. Here is the start of an idea to accomplish that. Missing from the renderings are the arm that holds the monitor from the case to the right of the recliner to the monitor in front of me. As  you can see the computer case is very large. I’ve provided for a UPS in the cabinet since in my area all my computers require a UPS due to frequent power glitches that would cause an unprotected computer to reboot. Click on pictures for larger views.

The arm will be mounted at the front left corner of the side cabinet. Notice that the cabinet projects forward of the side of the chair to allow the arm to reach to the side. The side reach must be about 22-24 inches. The base of the monitor will be slightly above the level of the side cabinet. The cabinet has a platform for the computer, which is raised above the floor by 3 inches to minimize dust intake. The cabinet design does not surround the computer case to allow for adequate cooling. The computer is built with a HAF-X, which is larger than would be ideal in this application. The computer is liquid cooled with fans that blow straight out the top. This makes placing the case inside a cabinet less desirable. Despite the size of the case and the number of fans, the computer is quiet, so I do not expect problems viewing TV this close to the computer. In fact it may be quieter then my current setup, since the laptop lap table has a fan which is quite loud. The HAF-X case may actually be quieter.

Here’s a view from the rear. The keyboard, mouse and gaming keypad will be held on a light wood table on the lap. Only the keyboard is shown in this rendering. The monitor I have chosen is a 20 inch Acer model with a VESA mount at the back, a DVI connection and a resolution of 1600×900. The Alienware m15x has a resolution of 1920×1200, but that resolution is not required for a great gaming experience. The larger screen will make seeing the interface details much easier. Sometimes I have to actually use a magnifier to see details on the laptop which has a 15 inch screen.

Rear View

Notice the rear of the cabinet has openings at the top and bottom to allow adequate circulation for the UPS. Also the cabinet will have a shelf for the sub-woofer for the 3 channel sound system. I want the gaming sound separate from the TV, and 2 channels and a sub-woofer will be plenty of fidelity. More to come as I choose an arm and finalize the design.

Here is an arm I’m considering by Innovative at lcdarms.com.

7Flex Arm by LcdArms

Update:

Here’s a render with the arm in place:

Arm in Place

- windy

TurPunkenClaus

With a naming scheme based on the TurDuck’En holiday meat dish, you might call the yard ornament:

• Tur-Punken-Claus.
• Tur-Jacko-Claus.
• Jacko-Tur-Claus.
• Jacko-Claus-key.

You get the idea. I’ve never seen such a thing for sale. Perhaps I should encourage a holiday yard ornament manufacturer to create several different types.

My style actually uses a Frosty the Snowman head because that was easier to model than a real Santa Claus head. Like I said, I’m lazy when it comes to the Holidays.

- windy

One of the pictures below is a demo of siping at the tire store where two samples of rubber, one siped and one smooth, are dragged across a smooth surface that has water on it. It take much more force to pull the siped sample across the surface. Siping is not a new process and you can see some very minor sniping in the original tires, some of which is picking up gravel chips. But you can see the new tires are much more aggressively siped.

Click on a picture for a larger view.

When I got this audio cabinet about 8 years ago I put 3 fans in it. I got the best fans that I could find to reduce the hum that fans all make – Vantec Stealth 5″, and a Vantec Stealth 3″ for the center bay. There is a small transformer hooked up to the Aux power of the receiver so that the fans turn on whenever the receiver is on.

Here is what I came up with only now after all these years to quiet the fans:

The original scheme had the fans mounted on a piece of 1/2″ plywood and that is isolated from the very thin cabinet back with 4 screws through grommets. Notice the slot in the plate and cabinet back for cable access. While this doesn’t seal the fan to the cabinet, the cooling does not suffer and cable access is greatly simplified.

See the next photo for the grommets:

The grommets hold the plywood and fan away from the back of the cabinet, but the screw still allows hum to conduct from the fan plate to the cabinet back, which acts like a sound board. The hum was not very annoying, but you could hear it.

In the past the fans were screwed directly to the 1/2″ plywood plate. But the recent idea, which totally deadens the hum, is to isolate the fans from the cabinet back with thin sheets of foam. This is shown in detail in the next photo:

The new scheme adds two thin – door skin 1/8″ plywood – ears to the fan. Then two sheets of open celled foam is glued between these ears and the plywood plate. Using open-cell foam allows the use of wood glue to glue the foam to the wood. Elmer’s or TightBond both work fine. Closed cell foam might work as well if it is rough so the glue can work. Of course you can use contact cement as well to glue the foam. You should pick as swishy a foam as you can find. stiff foam obviously will conduct more vibrations to the cabinet back. Using the foam, there is no solid coupling between the fan and the back of the cabinet. So the sound is completely deadened. It would no longer be necessary to use the grommets at this point. The 1/2″ plywood plate could be attached directly to the cabinet back. If I were doing a new design, I would use thin plywood instead of the 1/2 plywood since the weight of that mounting no longer contributes to the sound isolation.

Finally!! No fan hum!!

Good luck and I hope this gives you an idea if you have a similar problem,

enjoy,

windy

After more than 15 years, my Audio Research AR9 speakers are toast. Actually the speakers are fine, the only problem is that the urethane driver baffle has rotted out. Of course all speakers of this age do that. I’ve replaced the baffle a while ago on my Infinity Powered 10″ Subwoofer. It turns out that you can buy the baffles on the web for any size driver and glue them on yourself. But it’s a pain in the behind to do this for 1 driver, let alone 4 drivers, so I’m going to retire my old AR9′s in favor of a pair of new Polk Audio Monitor 60′s.

Here is the AR9 that bit the dust. Took me a while to figure out how to pull its pants down, so to speak, so I could see the drivers.

Notice that the lower driver’s baffle has completely rotted away. Apparently the oxygen gets to the urethane and turns it into mush.

Here are some closeups.

and a normal driver – rotted but not yet completely fragged.

And here is what the whole setup looks like:

Not sure yet whether I’ll put the Polks on the top of the plywood boxes or not.

- windy

In a completely different direction, its time for a new satellite TV service [Dish] and the DVR requires a phone connection – Dish charges another $5 a month if there’s no connection. They are probably harvesting viewing habits with the phone line, in addition to allowing PPV ordering.

These two issues have created a project to wire a set of CAT5 cables around the house. The rear of the house has no crawl space and no attic, so the wiring is external on the outside of the house. The best and simplest method appears to be to use outdoor CAT5 cable with UV coating and silicon gel for direct burial. Oregon is wet, so while not used for direct burial, the cable is likely to be wet for much of the year.

The connections were made using Leviton Quickport wall boxes and outlet plates.

The CAT5 connection goes straight from an office port around the house to a port on the wall in the back room. The phone connection is daisy chained from a port in the office to pick up the phone, to a port in the den, another port behind the entertainment center in the den and around to the back room with the CAT5 connection. Daisy chained connections are not normally used for phones, but 4 connections are required, and it seems unreasonable to wire 4 separate wires around the house. Of course daisy chain is not possible for CAT5 Ethernet.

After some experimentation, it seems that it is not possible to directly attach two cables to a QuickPort connector, and it’s not reasonable to take a single cable directly through a connector. So, a daisy chain point requires 6 3-way splices. All 6 wires were connected to the RJ-11 phone connectors, even though only 2 are used for the phone line.

These are little buttons that splice the wire without stripping. Stick the wires into the three openings and mash the button with a pair of pliers. The splice is filled with silicon gel, so the splice is waterproof. In this application, the splices are in the mounting boxes. One of the splices failed during the installation with one of the connections being intermittant.

The direct burial cable is filled with silicon gel, which makes it a sticky mess to work with. The gel does not come off with soap and water, but a trick was discovered. Wipe the wires with a paper towel wet with olive oil and the gel wipes off easily. Also olive oil removes the gel from hands and other items. Of course, soap and water easily removes olive oil when the job is done. Olive oil is a lot less smelly than paint thinner or other solvents.

The job is done, and all is working just fine.

Cheers…

I needed a printer cabinet. So I slapped one together from stuff I had around the house. 1/2″ OSB and 1/4″ oak plywood. I may get around to painting it, but for now it’s a natural. Click on the picture for a larger view.

Construction is routed dados for shelves with glue and staples.