Had to fit HDMI & Displayport cables through 25mm/1 inch electrical conduit (building static limits it to 25mm). The issue is that the connector won’t fit through the commercial 90-degree corners.
Solution? Enlarge the profile while keeping the bending radius:
Some CAD and a 3D print later I have the solution no money can buy. That’s the power of 3D-printing and modeling.
Going to wager those are significantly more flammable that the original material. Probably alright for purely low voltage applications. But not something to take lightly. 3D printing thermoplastics are not safe as electrical covers, conduit, or boxes.
UL94 V0 filament is available: PLA, PETG, ABS, PC and probably more.
V0 means stops burning within 10 seconds and
no dripping. That’s good enough for these applications.edit: apparently dripping is allowed as long as those aren’t flammable. Regardless most V0-rated filaments don’t drip as the “charcoal” when exposed to fire.
Whew, I for one, am glad a little dripping is allowed.
It’s not weird. It’s not gross. It’s normal and it’s allowed.
Almost any type of plastic that can be manufactured (and even some that otherwise sort of cannot) can also be 3d printed and almost all are available as filaments. Some of these filaments are very difficult to print, or very expensive, or very hard to find, or all of the above, but if you need 3d printer filament that meets any particular certification or material needs, there’s probably a filament for that, and it likely has official certification too. 3d printing is being used everywhere now, commercially and industrially. It’s not just for home-gamers anymore.
And even if you don’t find something you can print that will quite meet the same technical level of certification, there are still plenty of easy to print filaments that have quite good properties for things like flammability. It’s good to keep things like that in mind though, especially if you’re the sort of person who just defaults to PLA or PETG for everything. (I’m guilty of this)
I know everyone’s needs are different (I’m in Third World Nowhere, where building codes don’t exist and our solutions are limited by unusual practical circumstances), but isn’t HDMI-over-Ethernet a thing? I don’t know if I’d trust a 3D printed part with keeping water out in the long run
It’s a thing, but it’s either cheap and really sucks, or expensive and kind of sucks.
I am interested in it. Can you explain why it sucks?
The cheaper ones are generally pretty finicky, and often introduce weird compression. You’ll often find the stated achievable distances to require very good cabling with very good terminations.
If using cat cable was a necessity, I’d put the extra money down and get HDbaseT units. But I’d be pretty seriously looking into the various fully moulded active HDMI cables or even better, SDI solutions.
Water won’t get there and if the entire house is flooded and the walls are wet.
Fire protection is up to code.
If you would want to specify this (commercial installation) you likely would need to explicitly allow its use as this shape is not in the ISO/DIN standard.
I’m no electrician, I don’t run a lot of cable, I’m just a maybe-slightly-more-competent-than-average DIY homeowner type
Personally though, I like having cables run through conduits when possible for the ease of running them. I’m not particularly worried about water or mice or anything, it’s just a lot easier to just drop a cable down a pipe or suck a string through them with a plastic bag and shop vac than to try to fish them through the walls, especially anything I might want to upgrade at some point down the line when a new standard comes out like Ethernet or HDMI.
Makes sense. I just meant standard conduit, Ethernet cable straight through the conduit. Not into the home network.
I’ve pulled connectors through odd gaps, I know how it is.
Data rates and cost:
2x Display connections = 40 gbs
2x USB 3.0 = 10 gbs
=> 50 gbs through a CAT 7 is difficult
OM4 fibre optic is dirt cheap (under $1/m) but the KVMs are expensive at $800.
Using optical thunderbolt cables is also very expensive with $700 for the cable and dock.
Again, I just mean literally running Ethernet cables into standard conduits, terminating them, and sticking a HDMI over Ethernet box on either side. In order not to modify the conduits. I don’t know what the bandwidth is for that kind of solution. I’m not presenting it as the only and best option.
Your solution is cool. My own conduits are surrounded on four sides by concrete, so pulling connectors through is something that I only have to do very very rarely. And more often than not I find myself having to change one thing to wireless or use something that can make use of multiplexing just so I can free up a bit of space in there to do something else.
My own network is still an absolutely atrocious 200kB/s DSL through decaying, water-damaged copper lines. And those aren’t going through conduits, those have had concrete poured right over them. Over the 2x1mm thick flat two-strand “cable” that was obsolete when the building was built decades ago. RJ11. Plastic sheath that disintegrates into asbestos or some shit when exposed to sunlight. I’m not describing an ideal data transmission environment here.
HDMI over Ethernet box on either side.
$300 per connection: 2 display connections and two USB connections would cost $1200.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1649024-REG/kanexpro_ext_50m18g_4k_18gbps_hdmi_over.html
https://www.avaccess.com/products/u3ex100-usb3-2-extender/
Does this answer your question?
My solution isn’t cheap either: 10m USB-C 10gbit: 50€ each(b-stock/customer returns, normally expect to pay 100€), 15m DisplayPort & HDMI: 40€ each.
Total is approx. $200-2500 between cables and building materials.
And more often than not I find myself having to change one thing to wireless
Wireless HDMI is pretty interesting but low quality and high latency. The 60 GHz never took off and wouldn’t work anyway as it can’t pass through walls.
Wireless USB was a thing with USB 2.0 but it is dead. There was also some 60GHz USB for VR but that also failed in the market.
Ah, I’ve never looked into what hardware is actually available at the consumer level. That is a lot of money to move a video signal from one place to another.
FWIW I just looked at the AliExpress-tier options and they are much cheaper, but I don’t know about latency situation even if they do hit advertised bandwidth.
I didn’t even know HDMI cables went up to 15m for the copper version.
FWIW I just looked at the AliExpress-tier options and they are much cheaper
Those low cost Aliexpress hdmi over RJ45 are “last gen” HDMI limiting yourself to 4k@30Hz. This place already has CAT7 cabling so this would have been so much easier but sadly it isn’t good enough and the current gen are to expensive.
I didn’t even know HDMI cables went up to 15m for the copper version.
They are fiber optic with copper for power supply and side channel. For some reason they are fairly affordable compared to OM3 fiber solutions. Probably due to them running multiple fibers allowing the transceiver to be slower and simpler. With OM4 cables there is only one fiber per direction. I think HDMI is 4 pairs so it is 5GB/s for 4 fiber compared to 20GB/s for the OM4 cable.
I personally hate copper cables. There are so many bad cables out there that it can be hard to find one that works reliably (2-5m range). Knowing now that you can buy 5m fiber optic for 30€ I probably will move forward only buying fiber optic and just coil up the excess length.
