Looks like I've got some interest coming from somewhere on the intertubes, the last time I cleared the hit counter was a few months ago. I've still got the amp project going on and it's about time for a revamp of the page. Comments and suggestions are welcome, send them to me at ken at ghettonet dot org. Give me some ideas for updates to the page.

It's time to dump or update cutenews, it's been great for a few years of content management but the spammers got me and I had to turn off the random posts because I was getting tons of V!aGrA spam in the forum, my fault. I'll get a better system in place soon.

Thanks to all of you followers of the Ghettonets!

I'm going to try not to blow any fingers off this year.... Hopefully all of you have a great day!

Pat just updated the slackware-current change log with the following and I cant wait to try out the 64 bit version... can you sat Christmas in July?

ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware64-current/ChangeLog.txt

Wed Jul 1 16:04:35 CDT 2009
Hi folks -- the TODO isn't entirely empty here, but it's pretty much down
to minor nits, and so we're going to call this release candidate #1 and
(mostly) freeze further updates unless they happen to fix problems.
Regarding the kernel, 2.6.29.x has been well tested with this userspace
and seems like the best choice to ship for production use. Perhaps we
can put something else (at least source and configs) in /testing, though.

Ghettonet.org has been up and running for 9 years today. Not much has changed at the site, it's turned into a show showcase of my various projects and pointless ramblings. I've revived ghettonet mail and you can reach me at ken at ghettonet dot org.

I've recently built a media center PC for the living room and have not been impressed with my wimpy little bookshelf stereo for sound. I prefer the minimalist approach as my media center does everything I need for media playback. It does CD audio, DVD, TV, Clear QAM cable, FM radio, MP3's etc.

Instead of purchasing a surround sound receiver package, I've decided to just build a 6 channel amplifier and let the media center do all of the processing. The amp will have approximately 85W into 8 ohms or 100W into 4 ohms for all 6 channels and will use 6 TDA7294 amplifier IC's.

The amps I'm building are stereo using 2 amplifier IC's per board so I'll have a total of three amps in the one chassis. This will give me 2 channels for the front on one amp, 2 channels for the rear on the second amp, and one for the center and one for the sub on the third amp. The only control on the amp will be the on/off switch on the front, and 6 led's on the front, 3 green to show weather or not the amps are on and 3 red to show a fault in the amp boards. I may also include standby switches on the front of the case so I can shut down the rear, center, and sub amps for normal radio and CD or MP3 play.

I've got three amplifier kits ordered that have everything I need on one neat compact board. The power supply including the AC to DC rectifier and caps as well as a speaker protection circuit based on the upc1237 chip. The speaker protection will cut all output to the speakers during power on and off to prevent annoying pops. Each amplifier as I mentioned earlier has two TDA7294 amplifiers that will produce 85W per channel, to make 85W of music power you have to feed these chips that much current, so my little project with 6 amplifier chips will need at least 510 watts of power to keep them happy. That much power in one box is going to make a bit of heat that I'll need to dissipate through some large heatsinks.

I've ordered the heatsinks for the amps as well, these will make up the sides of the chassis and measure a huge 5 3/8" tall x 18" long x 1 3/8" thick. If you search ebay for barrredboss he's got a few different extrusions and will cut the heatsinks to what ever size you need and he's very helpful and extremely well priced.

Power for the amplifier is going to come from one really large transformer, I'm planning on using a AN-6228 600VA 28x28V toroidal transformer from ANTEKINC that will put out my required 600va for the amps at the proper voltage. The only problem with this is that a transformer this large tends to dim the lights as it's turned on! To prevent this and from happening and to limit the in-rush of current that the power supplies on the amplifier boards would get when turning this monster on I'll be using an InRush Current Limiter from AmpsLAB to tame the transformer and not blow fuses or pop circuit breakers when the amp is turned on.

I'll get some pictures up as all of the parts come in and since this project is going to be so detailed I've created a page for it here.

I know, I know that I never update the site anymore. I had good reason to after yesterday. John, AKA LILTOY showed up at my door, after not seeing each other in over eight years neither of us has changed much. We did a lot of catching up and hopefully will have time for more before he heads back to Texas. If any of you old heads from the Heath see this, shoot some email.