A few days ago, I worked with some of the newer members of our team to run a pair of 16 guage wires about 50 feet through the school’s ceiling.

This cable needed to cross two walls, one of which had never been unprofessionally penetrated before. Like usual, we taped the wires to the end of a fiberglass pole (the bendy kind used for road markers) and tried to poke it through peacefully with the bundles of ethernet cables. The pipes they passed through were gummed tightly, and eventually we gave up. We ended up pushing it through the oversized hole for a ventilation duct (though not oversized enough to make it easy for us.)

When we got into the back room, myself and others completely covered in bits of tile and ceiling dust, we tugged on the end of the cable. It fed through nicely for about three feet before being pulled taut. We were left with the two wire ends dangling 8 feet in the air. So much for the ten feet of slack I had been sure to allocate.  Fortunately, This new predicament forced us to place the stereo unit on an elevated platform, saving valuable floor space in our tiny backroom.

We then assembled an audio patch cable to connect the backroom server, quentin, to the stereo. I brought in an old cable with salvagable Radio Shack jacks on it, and we hacked it apart. After some soldering difficulties that destroyed the plastic hoods for both connectors and some greuling tests of the cable (”ohming-out” if you will), the cable passed QC and was installed.

“Okay, playing, turn up the volume slowly!”

And voila, music from the other room.

For ten seconds, then it cuts out.

“Dang, my Java program crashed. I’ll work on that later.”

While Stephen continues to work on that, I will have fun using mplayer wirelessly via SSH from my pocket-sized tablet.

Tags: audio, Electronics, soldering, Team 449, wiring