Leisure Room Equipment Installation

[nelsonic]

Context: Why Do We Need a Dedicated Room?

There are well-documented benefits to taking breaks from work so our plan is to have a room dedicated to this purpose. The "Leisure Room"¹ will have as many multi-player (board) games as possible to encourage social (in-person) interaction, it will also have musical instruments, a home cinema and a couple of games consoles with local co-op games.

This room and everything in it is very much a "nice to have"; a luxury, not a necessity. 💭 Having said that, we hypothesize that having this room will give significant joy/value to everyone who uses it. ❤️ Additionally, we feel that having a room dedicated to "not work" and in-person socialising is essential to success.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" ~ English Proverb (_+ infamous Shining scene_)

¹"Leisure Room" - we are still open to suggestions on the name for the room. 💡 💬 🙏 We briefly considered "Break Room", to emphasise that you are taking a "break" from you main activity/goal and it's not a room you want to spend the whole day in. However we don't want the work "Break" as there will be "nice things" in the room that we definitely don't want anyone to break. Words really matter! We are leaning towards "Recreation Room" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreation to emphasise the "creative" side. See the Etymology. The shorter "REC Room" has a dual meaning, but we don't want to over emphasize recording, although we will have it setup for live-streaming so that if people do want to stream the game they're playing, they can.

Fixing/Finishing Incomplete Work of Electrical Installers

There are 3 issues with the work done (not done) by the original electricians that need to be resolved:

• [x] No HDMI Cable was fed through the conduit, so we need to both buy and feed it. 💸 ⏳
• [x] Insufficient Audio Cables (only 4 were placed, we need 8 lines!). 🤦
• [x] No networking port at audio cable terminal; Network is required by the AV Receiver

The conduit in the walls is 15mm:

I tested it with an HDMI cable to confirm that a standard HDMI fits:

A rough measurement of the length of the HDMI cable we need is: 7.5m:

Sadly, there are no 7.5m HDMI Cables so going to have to use a 10m Cable and hide the spare 2.5m. Thankfully there is no signal degradation (expected) below 50 feet (15.24m) so we don't need to boost it:

Wires / Cables to Buy/Install

I want to pass 3 cables through the conduit:

• [x] HDMI (10m)
• [x] Audio (20m)
• [x] Ethernet (10m)

Optional:

• [x] Cable feeder - if I'm doing the work myself, I'm tempted to buy a manual cable feeder ... But I will attempt to do the feed without it first and then buy it if required.

Mounting

• [x] 20 mounting screws + rawl plugs (confirm screw head size with speaker mounting hole)
• [ ] (I want to) Laser-cut 5 mounting "plates" for angling the speakers (more on that later)
• [ ] "AV Box" to store the AV Receiver, Consoles, Games and Streaming Box. Design/Dimensions tbd.

[nelsonic]

Did a bit of price research and determined that the best price / delivery-time was to order from https://www.aquario.pt Not going spend a lot of time pasting links / screenshots for the cables we need because that's not the focus of this issue and the prices are definitely de minimis. Here's the total of my shopping cart:

Of this total, I'm only using around 8m of Cat6 cable and probably all of the audio cable. So the actual cost for just the leisure room is around €20 which is perfectly reasonable.

The 10m HDMI cable for €9.10 is perfectly reasonable (the Amazon UK price for an equivalent cable is £10!) https://www.amazon.co.uk/HDMI-Cable-Speed-Ethernet-Plated-Black/dp/B07TK23YTS

The 20m black+red 1.5mm audio cable for €5.41 is standard/cheap and matches what we already have so it's consistent. Yes, that's 305 meters of Cat6 cable for €59. I probably won't need that much. But rather than buying 10m for €20 and then having to buy more later when I'm doing the networking, I'm buying in bulk now and will just use what I need and keep the rest for future projects. I already have the RJ45 connectors as I've made up Ethernet cables before. This way I have exactly the right length of Cat6 cable for our needs on this project.

Order placed:

Paid:

Yes, that's yesterday's date. 📆 I did the research, made the purchase and took the screenshots prospectively, now I'm updating the thread. 👍

Anyway, should be available for collection tomorrow (Thursday) and I will do the setup work on Friday evening (after work).