A total of 11 reviews of this product on Reddit.
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It’s hard to tell with things like this,But for $30 it’s worth a shot. sometimes they’re fine and sometimes they cheap out on internal components and it shows. So if that’s the case, return it.
Bookmark this if that doesn’t work out. It’s actually marketed for your use case and has some good reviews.
https://www.amazon.com/AV-Access-Extender-Operating-Synchronously/dp/B01EV33R8S
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I put my workstation in the closet of my spare bedroom and my mouse / keyboard / monitor are in my living room. All you need is something like this and an HDMI <-> Cat6 extender (I’m using some now discontinued Cables2Go RapidRun cables, so I can’t make a recommendation for the HDMI extender). For the distances you’re talking, it should be physically easier to do than what I went through (cables up the closet wall, into and across the attic, then down the wall in the living room). 🙂
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I no longer consider my environment a “homelab”, as I’ve been using it in my daily life for several years now.
My ESXi (6.7) host is a Threadripper 1900x based system with 32GB of RAM. It has a USB3 PCIe controller, PERC H200e, and an RX480 installed. I’ve got a 1TB NVMe x3 SSD for my primary datastore.
I run two VMs:
My “primary” VM is a Win10 based system, and it has the USB3 controller and the RX480 attached. To those, I have my monitor / keyboard / mouse connected, and I’m using it to type this response right now. I use this VM for daily stuff, and for light gaming (Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, Starcraft II, and the like).
My “storage” VM is a WHS2011 based system (which was P2V’ed from a physical PC I used to have in the house). It has the H200e attached, and to that are four 3TB HDDs and two 4TB HDDs. These HDDs are pooled with StableBit DrivePool (and their Scanner product), and are used for general storage, but primarily for TV / movies. This VM also hosts my Plex / sabnzbd / Sonarr / Radarr ‘stack’. The media is generally consumed via a Chromecast w/ Google TV, though I sometimes use the Plex app on my phone or the web interface.
The ESXi host lives in a closet in my spare bedroom, while my monitor / keyboard / mouse are on a desk in my living room. I’m using some discontinued RapidRun digital cabling to bring the HDMI signal to the monitor, and this USB over Cat5/6 extender.
If it matters, I do have a custom XPEnology box in the house, and it has 7 4TB SAS disks in it. It’s used as a backup target for my VMs (they’re backed up with Macrium Reflect free edition), and sometimes I manually copy the TV directory from my primary NAS to the XPEnology box (just to help limit how much I’d have to re-download if my primary storage ever failed again).
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What kind of devices are you planning on using?
USB 2 over twisted pair is pretty cheap and doesn’t add (noticeable) latency or jitter, that’s what I ended up using since I don’t really need USB 3 devices on that link. How far you can go depends on the cable quality. This is the one i used, though only for about 10m (it claims 60m): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EV33R8S/
If you need USB3 and low jitter, you probably need a special (fiber-based) cable. Others pointed out thunderbolt which is ideal since it can carry the display signal as well (and other pcie stuff if you need later). If you already have a display solution and want to spend less there are also plain USB3 fiber cables that are a bit cheaper — Sewell and Monoprice have 100ft cables for about $200/$240 respectively.
For even longer ranges, I haven’t tried it but https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0798HHNJV/ looks very interesting: bring-your-own fiber for up to 250m range.
USB over IP devices exist and can carry USB 3 (though only up to 1 gbps), and since it’s running on your existing network it has perfect location flexibility, but the ones I’ve seen are Windows-only, and tend to add way too much jitter for common devices like audio interfaces.
Out of curiosity, why do you want to keep the mac mini in your rack? Such a small and quiet machine seems way easier to just put where it’ll be used; the number and bandwidth of connections to peripherals is usually way higher than to the network.
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Check out AV Access Hardware:
AV Access High Speed 4 Ports USB Extender Over Cat5e/6 up to 480Mbps, 4 × USB 2.0 Supports 2 USB Web Cameras Synchronously and All Operating System, Plug and Play Design https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01EV33R8S/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_VEV3XTRTX3THB8A3J9PH
For HDBaseT I use:
HDMI Extender Supports HDMI 2.0, HDCP 2.2, HDR, CEC, IR, RS232, PoE, HDBaseT, Zero Latency, Transfer [email protected] Signal up to 70m(230ft), 4K HDMI Extender https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B073QL6YT3/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_JYJBK9YFCK18Z7Z7MFM7?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
HDBaseT is night and day from streaming. It’s literally like I’m hooking the HDMI cable directly to my computer. Communicates EDID correctly, my computer see’s it’s an AVR with all the right codecs, Dolby Atmos + HDR. it CAN’T do 4k60 Dolby Vision because that requires more than 18Gbps. HDBaseT is currently capped at 18Gbps AFAIK. So you just have to make sure the video profile + audio falls under that threshold.
For your VR question… I’m not sure on that. For reference I have a AMD 6900XT going to an LG OLED. The 6900 XT mentions something about VR over AMD link… I’ll have to check that out.
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I just added 2 Encharge 10 batteries for whole-house backup to my existing 28 panel system. My house is part of a neighborhood of 10 net-zero townhomes, so the entry point for electric service to my home is not on my building. Instead it is two buildings and about 40 feet away at ground level. My 2 batteries and the Enpower switch are installed there, while the IQ Combiner with Envoy is installed in my attic near my array (3 floors up).
Needless to say, the required Wireless Communication Kit was not going to be able to communicate the distance (with no line-of-sight) between the IQ Combiner/Envoy and the batteries/switch. At present, Enphase requires wireless communication between the Envoy and BOTH the batteries and the switch. There is no hard-wired solution, though I have heard they are working on adding this capability.
Another issue I faced is that the required Consumption CT needs to be installed inside the Enpower switch (above the MID relay), but the CT’s wires must terminate at the IQ Combiner/Envoy.
The solution my installer used was to run two conduits: one for a Cat5E cable and the other for the Consumption CT wires and an electrical cable. The conduits are running from my attic across the roofs of my two neighbors and down to the batteries/switch.
Following [Enphase’s instructions here](https://www4.enphase.com/en-us/support/range-extension-usb-extender), I am using [this USB extender](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV33R8S/) to be able to move the Wireless Communications Kit close to the batteries/switch while running USB over Ethernet for the Kit back through the conduit to the IQ Combiner/Envoy. That USB extender’s transmitter has to be installed at the batteries/switch end and the transmitter requires power that must come from the backup panel. This is why the electrical cable is running through one of the conduits, supplying power from my house to the USB extender’s transmitter near the batteries/switch.
All is installed and I have verified that all of it is working correctly, though we have not yet completed the final commissioning step, so my battery system is not yet live.
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https://www.amazon.com/AV-Access-Extender-Operating-Synchronously/dp/B01EV33R8S
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There’s a bunch of these kind of things out there. This is just the first one I clicked on: wireless USB extender.
It’s more complex than just Bluetooth, because it has to correctly handle the USB data.
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I’ve been using these for USB cameras/mic’s lately. It’s cheap and works pretty well. It’s just USB2.0, but for most purposes it works just fine. Haven’t had any issues with losing sync with these. It even has 4 ports, so if your cam/mic/speaker happen to be different devices, you can run them all through one extender.
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It’s not extron, but I used this for about a solid year before I left my company. It was rock solid. It was only for mouse/keyboard though.
https://www.amazon.com/AV-Access-Extender-Operating-Synchronously/dp/B01EV33R8S
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For my “remote workstation” setup, I ran a Cables2Go 50′ digital RapidRun runner from my spare bedroom closet (where my ESXi host lives) to my living room, where my keyboard / mouse / monitor live. Don’t have a picture of the living room setup because my desk has become a dumping ground, and I’m not subjecting myself to that… lol Anyway, for the keyboard and mouse, I used one of these and an appropriate length of standard Cat5e cabling. The HDMI wall plates are standard Decora-style, so they accept standard Decora covers. I used a double gang low-voltage retrofit “box” at each side, and mounted the HDMI wall plate and a “brush” insert in each. This allows me to keep all the cabling in the wall in the living room (my monitor is mounted to the wall).
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How much power does the power supply of your active extender cable have? This interactive whiteboard needs 2W (or a bit less) according to the spec sheet.
You’ll probably need a solution that is a bit more capable than a simple active USB cable. Something like this should do the trick:
Two boxes, one plugs into the PC, the other into the whiteboard, an Ethernet cable in between. No drivers needed and the power supply is good enough, so this should work. The reviews (make sure to only read those that refer to this specific device, 50m U2EX50, since very different devices are sold on the same page) seem to indicate that it works with a wide variety of devices.
However, I’ve picked it a bit at random, so perhaps consider looking at similar devices first before making a purchasing decision. It seems like a perfect fit however.
