The Project: The Ultimate Media Controller and Librarian
Wouldn’t it be great to have just one box to store all your media library, connect to all your incoming media sources, and be your one and only home entertainment system? The clever folks at Modulus Media Systems came up with just that device. And when with our help they did, they won the following awards:
CEPro Best Award 2018 – Home Theater System
Residential Tech Today – Editor’s Choice Award 2018
Innovation & Technology Today – Editor’s Choice Award, Best Entertainment System 2016
Computers America – Top Tech Award
What We Did: Intelligent Lighting and Signalling
A smart box like the Modulus system has a lot of ways — onscreen and off — to signal status to its users. In particular the light bar around its outside had to offer visual confirmation of commands being accepted and executed. Since the processor at the heart of the system ran Linux, we had to devise a smart LED controller that could change 24-bit colors and do color fades and wipes from a command sequence sent over a tty terminal connection from the Linux host. And on the Linux side we had to write the Python scripts to send color commands and receive acknowledgements.
What We Did: System/Chassis Design
Sometimes we’re designing circuit boards and electronics right down at the level of individual transistors. And sometimes it’s the off-the-shelf single board computer that gets the job done. With Modulus, so much of their amazing functionality is buried deep in their proprietary software running on their Linux PC, our job was to make sure that all the parts fit in the box, didn’t overheat, and didn’t pull too much current. And we specified the power supplies to keep it running while designing the wiring harnesses that hooked it all together.