I received my V MSE Friday. I chose this particular remote/vcd package because it was cheap and offered the functionality that I wanted.
I took it out of the box. It came with all the connectors and screws needed for the installation. It took a bit of wrangling to get it in, but that was due primarily to the Thermaltake case that I have. The drive bay that I wanted to install it in has a entry point through the chassis behind the faceplate of the case. The faceplate of the MSE didn't quite fit through the hole, but I was able to finally get fitted. Unfortunately for some reason, Thermaltake decided to locate the internal drive fixtures in a VERY awkward location. A frame is mounted to the chassis just under the external drive bays. That is fine but the drive fixture is perpendicular to the drivebays. Probably the WORST decision and I really can't think of a reason as to why they would do this unless it has something to do with cooling. This means that the 1) The mounting screw that fixes the internal drive bay in place is a pain in the ass to screw in and it also means that a bit more ribbon cable is needed going from the hdd to the cd/dvd-rom. Normally, this would probably not be a problem, however, it makes it impossible to connect the top drive in the external drive bay to a drive in the internal drive bay. SOOOO, after I got the MSE mounted, I realized that I had to move it in order to cable the IDE hdd and cd/dvd-rom that I currently have. Took everything apart, rearranged and put it back together. My next purchase is a large capacity SATA hdd so I'll basically get to do it all over within a month or so. Fun!!
Ok, so the MSE was mounted. The connections for the remote system (IR, Remote, VFD panel) were pretty easy to understand and it didn't take long to get them connected. Everything is well labeled, the connections are pretty simple and the cables are more than long enough. I decided to plug the USB connector into an outside port just to reduce the initial complexity of the setup. The fuzzy board I have has 2 internal USB connectors, so once I got everything running, I moved the connector from the outside port to the internal usb connector by removing the adapter that was attached.,
I did make the mistake of also deciding to see about getting the front audio connectors hooked up as well, this has nothing to do with the MSE installation but I thought that since I was ripping everything apart, I might as well give it a try. Well, the little plastic frame around the on-board connector was too small for the wire so I had to modify it. The pins matched up but the plugin connector (female) form was to large in general. It took a while of bending and prodding to get it fitted but I eventually didn't. I wasn't able to get the sound working, so I've put that aside for now.
So the MSE hardware is installed. The next step, of course, is getting the drivers installed. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on my HTPC. I wasn't expecting a point and click install, and I was correct. There are 2 components needed to run the MSE. Lirc, which drives the remote and lcdproc which drives the display. I went ahead and installed these using the software manager. Getting the components to work at a basic level took a bit of time. I'll post more detailed instructions on how I did it once I get everything up and running and I'm able to fully duplicate the process at will.
The remote works well with XBMC. It's not perfect, but it is usable and convenient.
The VFD, however, doesn't work with XBMC. LCDproc is running, I currently have system info displayed so the next step is to figure out why XMBC refuses to communicate with lcdproc and display the relevant information on the MSE's screen. I recompiled XBMC and have an lcd.xml file in the userdata directory but that didn't help.
Once I get that up and running then I can work on remapping the remote so that it is fully functional. It works now, but some of the buttons that I would like to have aren't activating properly.
No comments:
Post a Comment