CuBox Project X

[Kunter]

Today the Cubox i4Pro has been delivered so I had to brush up on my Linux skills again! Since I have no active Linux systems running I downloaded a Fedora Live CD image and setup a USB stick to boot from that on my regular PC. After that I followed the instructions on the http://mubox.voyage.hk/cubox-i website and all is up and running now. I of course installed the real-time kernel.

I cut the end of the DC power cable from the power brick of my PicoPSU clone since it has a 2.1x5.5mm DC plug (and a ferrite core) and soldered the +5V and ground wires to the red and black wires of a shielded USB cable. For now I power the Cubox using a USB output of my music server but when my Anker batteries arrive (should be tomorrow) I can plug it into one of those since these have USB outputs as well.

It's too late now for critical listening but of course I wanted to test the Cubox and I do already like what I'm hearing at low volumes.

I'm playing music over ethernet for now from my NAS PC. It's advised to use the E-SATA connection for the best quality possible, so later I will copy the music to a SSD and install that in the Akasa X21 ESATA enclosure that's currently on route to me as well.

Here's a picture of the Cubox, for now lying on a central heating radiator behind the set. Of course I'll move it later to a nice and better spot inside my rack. Only connections you see are the Vodka USB, no-name CAT 7 ethernet cable and my home made power cable.

edit: tip for Kunter and any future owners of the Cubox. The real time tuning settings (http://mubox.voyage.hk/realtime_kernel_cuboxi) are not persistent and thus lost after a reboot. I created a script and call that from rc.local to reapply these settings after every reboot.

Code:

for IRQ in /proc/irq/* ; do echo 1 > $IRQ/smp_affinity ; done
for PID in $(pgrep ci_hdrc) ; do taskset -pc 1 $PID ; done
echo 2 > /proc/irq/72/smp_affinity
echo 2 > /proc/irq/75/smp_affinity
taskset -pca 2,3 $(pgrep mpd)
chrt -f -p 49 $(pgrep cifsd)
ps -eLo pid,group,lwp,rtprio,priority,time,cmd | egrep "cifsd"

Thanks and Kudos Antoine...

I had to go back to the stock power supply when something went wrong with the USB cable I was using (long story). But I should say the power supply is very important on Cubox sound quality. My shipment with cables, enclosures and everything should be here next week and I am restless waiting for them to see the effect.

Looking forward to hear your comments on sound quality...

One more thing; using the web gui, I assigned a fixed IP to the Cubox which makes it easier to get everything back together after every reboot (MPaD connection and all)

Cheers.

Kunter