DIY

Three years ago I wrote the article Building a multi-room networked home audio solution for FREE, Part 1 and never wrote part 2, where I promised I would show everyone how to put together a professional grade system for around $1,000. To date part 1 has been the most popular home network article on this site with over 45,000 views (next to the random article I wrote on how to remove a broken dipstick, which has over 73,000 views).

A few things have changed in those 3 years, inflation happens you know, but prices are still close to the same. There are more options now however, which I'll highlight as we go. My home has an accessible crawlspace which made running speaker wire insanely easy. Without that you may need to get creative, this article is going to assume you have the ability to at least run a little wire.

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I finally got around to "building out" my Raspberry Pi. Building it out is a rather superfluous explanation, basically all I did was remove it from the package, open the case I bought, put them together, add the SD card, and connect a cell phone charger. For the initial run I hooked it up to our Samsung TV, stealing the HDMI and network cable from the Seagate FreeAgent Theater I used in the TVersity review. What follows is just the simple speed test I ran against it.
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If you're lucky enough to have an HWg-STE ethernet thermometer for monitoring temps in your network closet or home theater cabinet, you know how hard it is to find the 1-wire temp sensor to complete both sensor inputs if you only have one sensor. In this short article I'll show you how to make one with a few parts from Home Depot and ebay.

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