Building a Custom External Control Hub: A Personal Project

The journey of building a custom external control hub began with a desire to create a unique and functional device that would cater to my specific needs as a gamer. I wanted a device that could provide me with a seamless and intuitive way to control my games, without the need for traditional controllers or remotes.

One of the main challenges in building this project was dealing with the length of USB cables. The problem arises when using multiple USB hubs, which can cause issues with the cable's ability to maintain its connection. To resolve this issue, I had to be careful when choosing my USB hubs, ensuring that they were reliable and wouldn't fail within a short period. After experiencing two expensive hubs fail in a matter of months, I opted for cheaper alternatives from eBay, which have proven to be much more durable.

Another crucial component of the project was the optical drive. I used a standard optical drive from a laptop, which features a SATA interface. To connect it to one of my USB hubs, I employed a SATA-to-USB converter, which I found to be reasonably reliable for around £4 on eBay. The process of connecting the converter required soldering wires onto the device directly, which added an extra layer of complexity to the build. However, this allowed me to save space at the back of the unit.

The optical drive is connected to one of my USB hubs using a SATA-to-USB converter and I have also built in two card readers in the unit. One card reader is a Kingston all-in-one card reader, which is silver with rounded edges and has proven to be fairly cheap and reliable. The other card reader is an integral SD card reader, but it only reads SD cards. Both card readers are connected to my USB hubs and have worked flawlessly.

Infrared Remote Control: A Game-Changer

One of the most exciting aspects of this project was incorporating a custom infrared remote control. After scouring eBay, I discovered a unique gem called an MLIe remote or My Emote. It has its own receiver and can be programmed to perform various functions, including media buttons and Windows Media Player buttons. The device is made in China and, although it may seem simple at first glance, it's clear that the designers have put considerable thought into its design.

To connect the infrared receiver, I had to build a line amplifier using an amplifier kit from Maplin, as well as a ground Loop isolator due to issues with electrostatic discharge. The microphone used is a homemade device built around an electret microphone from an old Dell laptop. The result is an incredible sound quality that surpasses any other microphone I've used.

Microphone and Amplifier: Key Components

The audio aspect of this project was crucial, as I wanted to create a seamless listening experience without the need for traditional headphones or speakers. To address the issue of transferring the microphone signal over long distances (in this case, 5 meters), I opted for connecting it via USB rather than an analog connection. This allowed me to use the PlayStation 2's SingStar microphone connection, which works via USB and can be connected to any computer as a normal audio input.

One of the standout features of this device is its stereo capabilities, which are rare in this price range (the microphone costs around £3). To achieve this, I had to build an amplifier for the microphone using the Maplin kit. Without this amplifier, the signal would be lost due to USB connection interference. Furthermore, a ground Loop isolator was necessary to prevent issues with electrostatic discharge.

The end result of this project is a fully functional external control hub that has exceeded my expectations. With its custom infrared remote control and seamless audio integration, it's clear that I've created something truly unique. If you're considering building your own device like this, I encourage you to take on the challenge. It may seem daunting at first, but with patience and dedication, you can create something truly remarkable.

Future Plans: A Blu-ray Drive

While my external control hub has been a resounding success, I'm not entirely done yet. In the future, I plan on expanding this project by incorporating a Blu-ray drive. While it may seem like an ambitious goal, I believe that with careful planning and design, it's achievable. This will require pushing the boundaries of the 2.0 specification, but I'm excited to take on the challenge.

For now, my external control hub has been a labor of love, providing me with endless hours of entertainment and customization options. If you're feeling adventurous and want to try your hand at building something like this, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to see what you create and offer any guidance or advice along the way. Happy building!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello this video is basically a build log of my external control Hub at the top of the screen you can see that there are several chapters because I've split this video into several parts so you don't have to watch the whole thing if you don't want to so if you just want to know how I handled a particular area just click the chapter and it will skip forward to where I cover that particular subject if not just uh continue watching now the purpose of this unit is to provide access to all of the controls and ports that would otherwise be on the computer itself such as the power button optical drive USB ports card readers audio connections and even a hard drive LED it's connected to the computer by a 5 M Wire which means that my computer can be in another room where I can't hear it because I like quiet Computing the computer itself is actually quite special because it's made out of of wood if you'd like to check this out there's a link to it in the description the unit itself is mostly made out of 4mm MDF these two supports you see here support the optical drive which divides the unit internally into two parts providing support for the upper Electronics the front is permanently attached to the base whilst the sides top and back slide on like like a shell the top latches onto these nuts and bolts to make it really sturdy and the shell is held in place by screws from the bottom the MDF has been veneered to make it look like proper hardwood and uh oiled as well to give it a nice Shine the top is just hardwood so that I could get the curved edges by pling then sanding it which has also been oil to get that nice shiny look to make all of the holes and slots in the front of the unit I basically used hand tools like chisels and files it's a bit of a fiddly process but uh if you put the time in It's Perfectly doable one of the most important and complex parts of this build was in fact the cable because it's quite a specialized use there aren't any cables that you can buy that would do the job so what I had to do was make it myself so I ended up using several different cables and binding them together using a plastic sheathing it's quite cheap and works quite well I wanted the unit to turn on and off with the computer so a perfect source of power is in fact the computer's own power supply now in order to get that power to the unit I needed really thick wire now this is because over the length of 5 m you need thick wire otherwise the wire won't be able to deliver the power power that's required especially for the optical drive what I used was audio cable but any really thick wire would do he can see that I've used four strands of it two for the ground and two for 5 volts which is the only voltage that's needed another wire I used was a USB 3.0 cable amazingly this was1 for 5 m so a pretty good bargain there I chose a USB 3.0 cable because it has so many internal wires it has two sets of screened wire and four loose wires and the whole thing is also screened I used the two screened pairs for the USB 2.0 connections and I used the remaining wires for the power button and hard drive LED now the final wire that I used in the cable is just a screened audio cable this wire was used to transfer the audio from the computer to the unit without any interference affecting the signal the audio link is fairly straightforward at the computer end the cable plugs into the sound card and the signal is sent through the screened audio cable as I mentioned earlier inside the unit there's a 10 wat amplifier but because my computer sound card is powerful enough to drive my passive speakers at a decent volume for most situations I've built in a power button that turns the amp on and off while whilst also redirecting the audio signal from going directly to the speakers to going through the amplifier first the amplifier that I've used is a amplifier kit from maplin now this is the only other device that needs a higher voltage so what I've done is add a little power socket at the back of the um unit uh which when I want to use the amplifier I just need to make sure it's plugged in and off I go obviously I don't want to use the speakers all the time so I've built and some ajio sockets as well as you can see there are three of them which allows for various configurations of inputs and outputs imagine the audio passing through from left to right the middle socket cuts the signal if something's plugged into it muting the speakers whilst the other two silver sockets always allow audio in and out this means that I can listen to my computer through headphones whilst listening to my MP3 player through the speakers or both through the headphones or both through the speakers you get the idea all the devices inside the unit work via USB there are five internal devices in total and four external USB ports connecting each to the computer's USB ports would make the wire too thick so what I've done is build in two four port USB hubs these hubs are powered by the computer's 5vt rail directly using the thick wire I mentioned in the cable chapter they're connected to the computer with the two screened wire pairs but not quite directly in the middle of the wire are two USB repeaters splitting the wire into two halves now these are required for Reliable USB data transfer at 5 m I know 5 m is within the USB 2.0 specifications but I was experiencing errors and bugs at 5 m on any wire in fact um it might not happen with you but it's just worth experimenting before you make your own wire the reason why USB repeater solve this problem is because USB cable length gets reset whenever a USB hub is used and a repeater is basically just a one port USB hub you need to be careful with choosing your USB hubs that you actually use in the unit um I bought two fairly expensive hubs and both failed within a space of a couple of months um ironically I've replaced them with really cheap Chinese units um they are no branded but they look like this uh there are load of them on eBay and they're very very cheap uh and these seem to be fairing a lot better the optical drive is a standard optical drive from a laptop it's got a SATA interface and I have connected it to one of the USB hubs using a a SATA to USB converter they're about £4 on eBay and um reasonably reliable they're a bit fiddly to connect to the USB hubs though to save space you have to solder the wires onto the converter directly which is a bit fiddly uh but it is worth it to save the um space at back now as far as I know you could even build a Blu-ray drivein and at some point in the future I do plan on building a Blu-ray Drive in but it would be pushing the be 2.0 spec a bit there are two card readers in the unit one is a Kingston all-in-one card reader which is the um silver one with the rounded edges it's uh fairly cheap and works very well it's very reliable and um it's just a great unit because it it looks quite aesthetically quite nice um the other card reader is a really cheap integral card reader this one just reads SD cards because that's one of the most used SD card types that I use and uh but yeah both are reliable enough I've not had any issues so if you want to use these two I heartedly recommend them again these are just connected to the USB hubs that have built in now this is one of my favorite bits the infrared remote now I found this on eBay it's quite a gem actually it's called an mlei remote or my emote or something like that it's made in China and it has its own little receiver and you can program all the buttons to do what you want you can have media buttons or you could have Windows Media Player buttons or whatever and it actually um programs it into the firmware chip it was cheap in price but they've really thought about it as a product the uh infrared receiver is just built in under the hard drive LED it just goes straight into the receiver chip which works via USB and goes into the uh USB hubs and now the microphone which I'm actually using now to record this video um this was one of the more time consuming parts of the project although it seems simple I do like fiddling with audio and I wanted to get quite a good result so obviously to transfer a microphone signal over a 5m cable with all the USB connection interference and stuff going on would not work well so connecting the microphone via USB rather than an analog connection is really the only way to go so what I've used for this is the PlayStation 2's singstar microphone connection which works via USB and can be connected to any computer as a normal USB be audio input um one of the great things about this is that it's stereo um which is quite a rarity especially for £3 because that's how much it cost obviously this is a line level input so before the microphone can be plugged in you need to uh build an amplifier um for it um I used a amplifier kit from maplin um and I also needed a ground Loop isolator because they it works of the same 5 volts that the input is working off and it created a ground Loop you need to prevent that with a ground Loop isolator and the microphone is homemade as well actually it uses a an electr microphone from an old Dell laptop um I'm using this electrc cuz it sounds brilliant it sounds way better than any other microphone I've used so that wraps up the creation of my external control Hub um I hope you found this video useful and I hope you've learned a few things from it um if you do attempt one of these yourself uh please send me a picture of your progress um I'd love to see what you do and um just be creative with it try your own designs and uh have fun there isn't anything like this you can buy so if you make one you can say I made that to your friends and they'll be like wow so that's good um if you want to have a look at the other projects I've been working on please have a look at my channel um if you've enjoyed this video uh please give it a thumbs up and if you have any questions just leave them in the comments and I will answer them as soon as I can um I'm Matt and thank you very much for watchinghello this video is basically a build log of my external control Hub at the top of the screen you can see that there are several chapters because I've split this video into several parts so you don't have to watch the whole thing if you don't want to so if you just want to know how I handled a particular area just click the chapter and it will skip forward to where I cover that particular subject if not just uh continue watching now the purpose of this unit is to provide access to all of the controls and ports that would otherwise be on the computer itself such as the power button optical drive USB ports card readers audio connections and even a hard drive LED it's connected to the computer by a 5 M Wire which means that my computer can be in another room where I can't hear it because I like quiet Computing the computer itself is actually quite special because it's made out of of wood if you'd like to check this out there's a link to it in the description the unit itself is mostly made out of 4mm MDF these two supports you see here support the optical drive which divides the unit internally into two parts providing support for the upper Electronics the front is permanently attached to the base whilst the sides top and back slide on like like a shell the top latches onto these nuts and bolts to make it really sturdy and the shell is held in place by screws from the bottom the MDF has been veneered to make it look like proper hardwood and uh oiled as well to give it a nice Shine the top is just hardwood so that I could get the curved edges by pling then sanding it which has also been oil to get that nice shiny look to make all of the holes and slots in the front of the unit I basically used hand tools like chisels and files it's a bit of a fiddly process but uh if you put the time in It's Perfectly doable one of the most important and complex parts of this build was in fact the cable because it's quite a specialized use there aren't any cables that you can buy that would do the job so what I had to do was make it myself so I ended up using several different cables and binding them together using a plastic sheathing it's quite cheap and works quite well I wanted the unit to turn on and off with the computer so a perfect source of power is in fact the computer's own power supply now in order to get that power to the unit I needed really thick wire now this is because over the length of 5 m you need thick wire otherwise the wire won't be able to deliver the power power that's required especially for the optical drive what I used was audio cable but any really thick wire would do he can see that I've used four strands of it two for the ground and two for 5 volts which is the only voltage that's needed another wire I used was a USB 3.0 cable amazingly this was1 for 5 m so a pretty good bargain there I chose a USB 3.0 cable because it has so many internal wires it has two sets of screened wire and four loose wires and the whole thing is also screened I used the two screened pairs for the USB 2.0 connections and I used the remaining wires for the power button and hard drive LED now the final wire that I used in the cable is just a screened audio cable this wire was used to transfer the audio from the computer to the unit without any interference affecting the signal the audio link is fairly straightforward at the computer end the cable plugs into the sound card and the signal is sent through the screened audio cable as I mentioned earlier inside the unit there's a 10 wat amplifier but because my computer sound card is powerful enough to drive my passive speakers at a decent volume for most situations I've built in a power button that turns the amp on and off while whilst also redirecting the audio signal from going directly to the speakers to going through the amplifier first the amplifier that I've used is a amplifier kit from maplin now this is the only other device that needs a higher voltage so what I've done is add a little power socket at the back of the um unit uh which when I want to use the amplifier I just need to make sure it's plugged in and off I go obviously I don't want to use the speakers all the time so I've built and some ajio sockets as well as you can see there are three of them which allows for various configurations of inputs and outputs imagine the audio passing through from left to right the middle socket cuts the signal if something's plugged into it muting the speakers whilst the other two silver sockets always allow audio in and out this means that I can listen to my computer through headphones whilst listening to my MP3 player through the speakers or both through the headphones or both through the speakers you get the idea all the devices inside the unit work via USB there are five internal devices in total and four external USB ports connecting each to the computer's USB ports would make the wire too thick so what I've done is build in two four port USB hubs these hubs are powered by the computer's 5vt rail directly using the thick wire I mentioned in the cable chapter they're connected to the computer with the two screened wire pairs but not quite directly in the middle of the wire are two USB repeaters splitting the wire into two halves now these are required for Reliable USB data transfer at 5 m I know 5 m is within the USB 2.0 specifications but I was experiencing errors and bugs at 5 m on any wire in fact um it might not happen with you but it's just worth experimenting before you make your own wire the reason why USB repeater solve this problem is because USB cable length gets reset whenever a USB hub is used and a repeater is basically just a one port USB hub you need to be careful with choosing your USB hubs that you actually use in the unit um I bought two fairly expensive hubs and both failed within a space of a couple of months um ironically I've replaced them with really cheap Chinese units um they are no branded but they look like this uh there are load of them on eBay and they're very very cheap uh and these seem to be fairing a lot better the optical drive is a standard optical drive from a laptop it's got a SATA interface and I have connected it to one of the USB hubs using a a SATA to USB converter they're about £4 on eBay and um reasonably reliable they're a bit fiddly to connect to the USB hubs though to save space you have to solder the wires onto the converter directly which is a bit fiddly uh but it is worth it to save the um space at back now as far as I know you could even build a Blu-ray drivein and at some point in the future I do plan on building a Blu-ray Drive in but it would be pushing the be 2.0 spec a bit there are two card readers in the unit one is a Kingston all-in-one card reader which is the um silver one with the rounded edges it's uh fairly cheap and works very well it's very reliable and um it's just a great unit because it it looks quite aesthetically quite nice um the other card reader is a really cheap integral card reader this one just reads SD cards because that's one of the most used SD card types that I use and uh but yeah both are reliable enough I've not had any issues so if you want to use these two I heartedly recommend them again these are just connected to the USB hubs that have built in now this is one of my favorite bits the infrared remote now I found this on eBay it's quite a gem actually it's called an mlei remote or my emote or something like that it's made in China and it has its own little receiver and you can program all the buttons to do what you want you can have media buttons or you could have Windows Media Player buttons or whatever and it actually um programs it into the firmware chip it was cheap in price but they've really thought about it as a product the uh infrared receiver is just built in under the hard drive LED it just goes straight into the receiver chip which works via USB and goes into the uh USB hubs and now the microphone which I'm actually using now to record this video um this was one of the more time consuming parts of the project although it seems simple I do like fiddling with audio and I wanted to get quite a good result so obviously to transfer a microphone signal over a 5m cable with all the USB connection interference and stuff going on would not work well so connecting the microphone via USB rather than an analog connection is really the only way to go so what I've used for this is the PlayStation 2's singstar microphone connection which works via USB and can be connected to any computer as a normal USB be audio input um one of the great things about this is that it's stereo um which is quite a rarity especially for £3 because that's how much it cost obviously this is a line level input so before the microphone can be plugged in you need to uh build an amplifier um for it um I used a amplifier kit from maplin um and I also needed a ground Loop isolator because they it works of the same 5 volts that the input is working off and it created a ground Loop you need to prevent that with a ground Loop isolator and the microphone is homemade as well actually it uses a an electr microphone from an old Dell laptop um I'm using this electrc cuz it sounds brilliant it sounds way better than any other microphone I've used so that wraps up the creation of my external control Hub um I hope you found this video useful and I hope you've learned a few things from it um if you do attempt one of these yourself uh please send me a picture of your progress um I'd love to see what you do and um just be creative with it try your own designs and uh have fun there isn't anything like this you can buy so if you make one you can say I made that to your friends and they'll be like wow so that's good um if you want to have a look at the other projects I've been working on please have a look at my channel um if you've enjoyed this video uh please give it a thumbs up and if you have any questions just leave them in the comments and I will answer them as soon as I can um I'm Matt and thank you very much for watching\n"