The plan for system

There are three areas at my home apartment that play key role in designing the system:

1. The hallway cabinets with connection to TV cable for the cable modem, and sufficiently room to hide devices.
2. The living room with home entertainment system.
3. The workstation, where I do the photo and video editing, is a desk located at hallway.

The apartment is not a huge one, but there are lot of concrete walls and very much 2,4GHz traffic in the air. As I wrote in the first blog post, I need to have two access points to secure the wireless connection to all areas. Luckily, there are already two parallel gigabit Ethernet cables (Cat 6, ~25m both) running from the hallway cabinets to living room enabling wired connection between the two access points. What enables me to maintain and use these Ethernet cables, is that they are for the most part nicely hidden inside hallway cabins and the ceilings. 

The primary design criteria (~ User Requirement Specifications) is as follows:

1. Hide the devices (as much as it is reasonable), particularly the big black devices and the cables.
2. Connect the printer to network to enable wireless printing.
3. Good wireless access to and from all locations in the apartment.
4. Keep the existing display, pen tablet, and the scanner at the workplace
5. With reason, utilize existing legacy devices. 
6. Derived from the first design criteria, the pen tablet and the scanner will be stored in the drawers of the workstation desk.

The plan with the available cabling, locations, access requirements and design criteria is as in the following diagram. 

The distance from the Time Capsule to the workstation is less than 2m. However, there is a 20cm concrete wall just in between, and it may be impenetrable for 5GHz wireless connection. I still have hopes that as the distance is so short that the signal can find other route (U-shape) between the workstation desk and the Time Capsule. The plan B is to drill a hole to the closet wall, and place the Time Capsule on the ceiling right above the workstation desk. 

Since placing the Time Capsule on the hallway ceiling  is a major violation of the first design principle, my hunch feeling is that the plan C is significantly more probable than the plan B. The hole in the wall, regardless how well it can be disguised, doesn't improve the odds for plan B.

The components in the hallway cabinets:

• Cable modem - owned by the internet connection provider.
• Time Capsule with:
  - dual band wireless (5GHz and 2,4GHz),
  - router with three LAN ports,
  - 2T network accessible storage for back-ups, and
  - one USB port for e.g. printer or USB drive.
• USB hub to mediate the Time Capsules handicap to have only single USB port. It can be passive USB since the devices I intend to connect to it do not draw any power from the USB connection.
• An existing 500GB NAS for storing the FLAC music files from more than 500 albums, and for other miscellaneous files that do not require any particular back-up.
• An existing 500GB USB for redundant once in month back-up from the most precious photos and video's.
• Canon Pixma IP4700 inkjet printer which fits quite nicely to a cabinet shelf. The printer is an entry model inkjet printer, but I love it because of the relatively true color reproduction. The fact, that it has the cheapest original inks of all mainstream brand inkjet printers, is not that bad thing either. I hope it will still last for a long time since Canon does not any more make printers that would use its economical ink cartridges.

The componets at the workstation/desk:

• MacBook Pro 15" (which of course will be mobile, but the workstation desk is its home).
• 23" NEC MultiSync EA232WMi display, which is more than decent for Lightroom working. The colors I get from the monitor are well reproduced to the Canon Pixma inkjet.
• Wacom Intuos M4 tablet; indispensable while doing more serious Photoshopping.
• Eye One Display 2 monitor colorimeter.
• Canon Lide 80 A4 scanner.
• External 500GB USB powered portable USB 3.0 hard disk that comes with me for photo and video footage storage when traveling. Unfortunately the capability USB 3.0 speed goes in vain with the MacBook Pro.
• External optical drive for the MacBook Pro. The drive will be the one that flies out of the MacBook pro to give space for second internal drive. The housing, as I wrote in the previous blog post, comes from eBay.
• The cameras (Canon 7D, Panasonic TZ5, GoPro), wireless bluetooth travel speaker Jambox by Jawbone, mobile phone (Nokia N8) and some occasional other devices will be used on the workstation as well.
• An active Belkin 7-port USB 2.0 HUB with external power supply to provide power to all connected USB devices.

 The components at living room

• Airport Express for extending the wireless network from the Time Capsule and for streaming music from its analog or optical digital output to my preamp.
• Squeezebox by SlimDevices (currently Logitech) for playing the free lossless compressed FLAC files from the network. It is very nice device, but limited only to my CD collection (as well as CD's that I have had on loan from my friends and bublic library) which then were ripped to computer using Exact Audio Copy (EAC). The jitter free sound quality of the EAC ripped and verified files is superior to what standard CD/DVD/BD players can read. Because of the limitation only to CD's that I have had in my use, lately, I resort to Spotify much more often to get any music I want. The sound quality of Spotify is not on par with Squeezebox and FLAC's but quite OK anyway.

Future options:

• I have an itegrated Intel Atom board + processor that consumes merely 17w. It is not in use Today, but I could make a media server for home entartaiment system of it. I also have an extra 3,5" 500GB hard disk drive that I could use as media file storage. It could be best of using linux on that. I do not know how I could control that linux box remotely via OS X. If anyone has any ideas, I would be grateful to hear about them (yes, I know, I should google it).
• In future it may be that the 2T Time Capsule, 500GB NAS, and 500GB USB connected to Time Capsule do not provide enough storage, back-up capacity, or redundant back-up capacity. Hence I may need to get 4 to 8T NAS into the system.
• With the Linux box and additional NAS, I ran out of the LAN ports in the Time Capsule. Therefore I could get a 5 to 8 port switch for more LAN ports.