Although, I’ve noticed that the VB7001G board I’m using has inconsistent results on the calculator — 16.23 watts idle versus 13.92 in “network mode”. Take it for what it’s worth.

While [...]]]> The Via Epia mini-ITX boards are some of the lowest power around. Epiacenter.com has a power simulator that’s good for comparing the differences in boards.

Although, I’ve noticed that the VB7001G board I’m using has inconsistent results on the calculator — 16.23 watts idle versus 13.92 in “network mode”. Take it for what it’s worth.

While I’m at it — first booted the Via VB7001G this evening. The sole purpose of this is for use as my main mail/web server as well as the mythtv backend. With a good power supply and a laptop HD for the primary (non-video) storage, I hope to have a box that idles at <30 watts. Then the power hog P4 system connected to the TV would only be booted as needed.

Using an el’cheepo power supply and an old Maxtor HDD pulled from the shelf, it’s currently idling along at 46 W. Not a bad start. I think there’s easily enough room for improvement to achieve the goal. Silent PC Review got their EN12000 board down to 17W at idle — mind you, they had a 5 W head start on me using a low-power variant of the C7 CPU  (not to mention 20% slower, and ~300% more expensive).

Here’s a good review of popular 2.5″ notebook hard drives.

Update: With a 90W Pico Power supply + the tuner card and 1.25 TB of disk on-line (2 disks, one 250MB laptop, and one 3.5″ 1.0 TB Western Digital Caviar Green Power drives), the box is idling at a grand total of 25 watts (AC wall power)! Mission Accomplished.

There’s still some room to tweak that down a bit. The 1TB drive does not need to be spun-up full time. That should drop the idle power down a few extra watts.

Once it is installed, the first thing is to get the listing service setup. Seams simple enough with not-for-profit Schedules Direct [...]]]> The pcHDTV 5500 tv tuner capture card allows Linux users the ability to record television broadcasts using an antenna or from cable. Using MythTV the setup is fairly straight forward, at least, it should have been…

Once it is installed, the first thing is to get the listing service setup. Seams simple enough with not-for-profit Schedules Direct service (now that the zap2it freebie is gone). Signed up for an account and gave the info to myth. Upon trying to run ‘mythfilldatabase’, all I got were a bunch of “500 server error” responses from  the Schedules Direct server. This less than helpful message was the result of not providing a “lineup”, which identifies exactly what listings you want it to deliver. For instance, I want all of the local broadcasts that I can pick up with an antenna in San Jose. Once that was resolved the capture card was able to complete a station scan and it was up and running.

However, the remote was now dead. LIRC had been previously setup and working fine using a home brew serial port infrared receiver on COM1. Debugging with ‘irw’ showed that all appeared correct — LIRC was happily accepting devices and running fine. But, firing up ‘irw’ gave no output when mashing buttons on the remote.

After much hair pulling, I finally yanked the 5500 tuner card out and, wouldn’t you know: LIRC worked just as it always had. As I suspected, the tuner card was conflicting with COM1. To prove my suspicion, I put the tuner card into a different PCI slot an everything worked perfectly.
I’m no expert on IRQ conflicts, but I think that just might be what it was.