Another week and we're preparing for yet another show. This time it's Screen Expo - more details about the show can be found on our latest events page.

At the last show, the AV cupboard in our stand became a rats nest of power, network and video cables within seconds, so we thought we'd spend some time before the next show tidying everything up. Its taken us a whole week just to find the right power plugs for the media players...

Whilst our MC400 Digital Signage players are fanless and can be rack mounted, the AV cupboard in our stand is too small to fix 6 of the units in. The MC100 units would easily fit into the cupboard being the size of a 3.5" hard disk and are ultra low-power - less than 4W - so can be easily stacked without getting too warm, but they're not quite powerful enough for all the complex scenes and displays we want to show off.

Luckily we managed to find a nice little barebone system, based around a netbook motherboard, which is perfect for the job. The system use the Atom 270 processor and the 945GME chipset, which is found in the MC400 player, so the MediaCAT software worked straight away. Even better, the systems have an SD card slot, which allows us to use a 4GB SD card for the MediaCAT OS and around 3GB of media storage. A small fan blowing out the side helps keep them all cool when stacked on top of each other.

Once they're all plugged in and stacked up, we were left with a rats of nest of IEC cables, power adaptors, main extension leads and DC power cables - which is what we wanted to get rid of in the first place. So we thought, why not just use one big power adapter and split it into 6 fly leads!

Finding the adapter was no problem - we had a spare 19v, 100W laptop adaptor kicking around - a bit of choc block on the DC lead, solder up some standard 2.1mm DC plugs onto some fly leads, plug it all in and away we go. Except they didn't turn on. A bit of head scratching and a multi-metering later and we realised our mistake. The original DC power plugs have an outer diamter of 5.5mm and an inner of 1.7mm. Standard 2.1mm DC plugs are 5.5mm outer and 2.1mm inner - so it looked like they fit perfectly, but there was no inner pin connection.

Now it turns out that despite this 5.5mmx1.7mm connector being pretty much standard for all Acer netbooks/nettops/laptops, they're virtually impossible to get hold of! We spent the next few days ordering and trying a plethora of different plugs, 5.5x1.3 (didn't fit), 4.8x1.7 (kept falling out) - we even resorted to trying to use some of those pin plugs from multi-purpose DC adaptors!

We we're almost at the point of cutting the leads off the original adapters when we came across Reveal Cables who stock an enormous range of plugs - luckily the 5.5mm x 1.6mm plug did the trick for us and is a nice tight fit too, so hopefully won't get knocked out!

So, 4 wiring looms later and the AV cupboard is up and running again and rats nest free. We also know where to get a new DC plug for our Acer laptop adaptors if we ever need one!