I've been doing a series of posts on another forum about the HA stuff I'm doing, was asked to duplicate that here as it's all integrated with the HT stuff. Anyhow, not sure anyone here cares, i'll update as I go.

To keep it simple for me to do, i'll just copy/paste each post here. There's only a few so far.

Post #1: 4/2/06: And so it begins...
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I've done some stuff around the periphery of HA, got an irrigation controller connected to CQC [not yet controlling my actual sprinkler system, still working through some cable-creation kinks], an aprilaire HVAC [but I broke the RS232 adapter by mistake].

But today I made a HUGE step forward, thought I'd share. BTW, this is all with my el cheapo SageTV/DVD/CQC Server that I use for the home theater thing. I can't believe my 3yr old budget Asus mobo and 512MB RAM is the engine behind my whole house. I have an AMD2500 in it, but it rarely goes above 15% CPU, usually ~5%.

I bought an Elk automation panel. Think ADT on steroids, and much cheaper to boot. You can get the "ez" version of it for pretty cheap, $350, or even less if you're a CQC customer. (http://www.interscienceintl.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=30_31_33&products_id=66) It can control security, HVAC, lighting, doorbell & telephone ring detection [and since it's integrated with the HT thing, i'm hoping to pause audio/video], a ton of other stuff. I paid $2.50/each for window sensors, whereas ADT wanted $100/each. I'll be putting Window/smoke/motion/heat/CO/flood/...., throughout the house. I think all the sensors total will cost me <$700. Granted, a crapload of time to do the wiring, but that's the fun part.

So anyhow, i'm tired and I digress. Today I got the panel hooked into the CQC Server via RS232, mounted the keypad, the voice-box, and a remote temperature module. I was so excited, I pulled out the architectural drawings for my house, mocked that up in photoshop, and (of course) found a piece of art for the backdrop.


http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_House_Temperature.JPG

Post #2: 4/3/06: It continues...
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Last week I had ran all new wiring for a doorbell as I didn't have any due to using a wireless. But, it worked for crap in my 100yr old plaster/lathe house, and I wanted to do some more intelligence, so I switched to a wired doorbell. Cheap as heck too. ($10 for the chime, $15 for the power source, $10 for the fancy restoration hardware doorbell button, $40 for the Elk doorbell ring detector)

Today I:
- Ran wiring for 2nd doorbell pushbutton. [doesn't work though, I broke one of the wires by accident. Should be simple to replace].

- Got Elk setup to trap the doorbell, and say something via the loudspeaker. It's not entirely stable, i didn't do a "fast loop detection", which I realized at 9pm after my kids went to bed so I can't test this tonight. I actually did wake them up earlier, but wife just looked at me and said "you woke them up, you get them". See below for my next steps.

- Ran wiring for 2 more thermocouples [one in BR, one outside]. I updated the CQC screens, check out the screenshot above. They were both working fine, but I just looked again and the outside stopped working. Not sure why, i'll have to recheck the wiring.

- Started reading up on the CQC events server, and a bunch of supporting material so I could do some cool stuff with the Doorbell. Also, to finally do something with the rain8NET since it finally works. (not that i've been brave enough to try my hand at another long RJ12 cable yet after completely messing up the first one).

Hopefully this week i'll be able to

1) get the Elk trapping the doorbell consistently, and get CQC to display a visual clue on the screen if/when it happens. It would be super-neat if I could figure out how to pause SageTV and pop CQC up and tell folks there's someone at the door, as in my house the TV room is all the way in the back and we don't ever hear it if the TV is on. It gets complex as it would have to know whether kids are watching TV, in which case don't pause it, or if mom is, in which case please pause it. Some of that intelligence is outside CQC's abilities right now, but Dean's working on it so I'm sure it'll be done once that whole CD/DVD mega-release is done.

2) If #1 works, then do the same thing with the telephone ring detector [on same Elk board].

I also just realized that since I have those two, I could probably setup the Elk and CQC so that I could pull the chime off the doorbell circuit, add another contact closure, and then use CQC to create a "quiet/nap" mode where the doorbell doesn't ring, and one where it does ring. That way the kids don't wake up if the Jehovah's witnesses come a-knockin...

Post #3: 4/5/06: Scope Creep sets in
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Dear Diary:
Today I decided that if I was seriously going to rip out my ADT system and put this in, I should do it correctly from the get-go. My wife has been after me to put in more window & motion sensors anyhow, and I decided to put in integrated heat, smoke, & CO sensors. After all, those cheap $10 smoke detectors may not wake us up in the late night, and i've now got all that HTPC equipment in the house.

I ended up buying 37 window/motion/heat/CO/etc sensors from toymaster, a professional CI who's been giving great prices for the CQC folks (http://www.interscienceintl.com/catalog/index.php). Got a good deal, and enough sensors to "correctly" cover my 1650 sqft/9 room house, plus the attic & the basement. The all-in cost was ~$1200, which may sound like a lot but ADT wanted $4K for that. Of course, that includes labor, but for $3K i'll do my own dang labor.

Hopefully this all works out and I can get all this stuff run over the next 1-2 months. It's certainly a boatload of work, but once it's done I'll sleep better at night knowing the house is more protected.

Post #4: And more...
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Today I learned how to wire up a motion sensor (ok, not that hard, but new to me). Plus I used a CQC "Enumerated Image" widget for the first time as I was trying to find a way to have CQC automatically switch between green & red if there was motion in a room.

Finally, I started putting some of Ripper's (artist & fellow CQC owner) amazing Elk graphics to use. I setup a bunch of command buttons. The screen doesn't have the full Elk keypad, I only put the #s, ready/armed/stay, as I am still learning how to use the Elk too and don't know what the other buttons do.

I chopped up my house photoshop image and created custom-sized green/red zones, along with a "motion" text image that I put into another enumerated widget and stacked on top of the others. It shows nothing when normal, an image of the word "motion" when tripped.

BTW, the "disarmed" & "ready to arm" are actually real values from the security keypad. It's not yet hooked up to the fire dept/etc as I don't actually have any sensors in place yet, but I figured that I'm not doing anymore "dummy" code, so what you see here is all "functional". Doesn't do much, but fxnl nonetheless.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_House_Motion.JPG

Post #5: 4/9 - The beginnings of HT/HA convergence...
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So it was a very productive day. After doing pretty much nothing HA-related yesterday, I spent 3-4 hours today and completed the following (i'll spare you from the half-done stuff):

1) Irrigation: Hooked up Irrigation system to system, wrote up a CQC screen to control. I'm using the RAIN8 device, which is really just a fancy "contact closure", meaning all it does is close a circuit for a given zone which turns the water on for that zone. All the intelligence is done on your PC.
2) Doorbell: Figured out how to get CQC to pop up a "Someone rang the doorbell" box. This is currently only within CQC; i have yet to research how to pause TheaterTek or SageTV and pop up a box. Now that I figured out how to pop this up, that's the next step.
3) Security:Mounted another motion sensor, moved the above one to the "correct" location, hid the wires so it's a professional-looking install for both.
4)Weather: The wife is always checking the weather, so I decided to add it to the wrapper. The last screenshot shows the temperature outside the front door [via the Elk and a networked thermometer], and Weather.com's forecast for my area.

Next up:
1) Phone:See if I can pause TV/DVD/lower stereo, and display caller-id on screen if the phone rings.
2) HVAC:Figure out if my HVAC RS232 adapter is really broken, or if I just screwed up another wiring run.

Here's some more screenshots:
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Irrigation.JPG

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Doorbell.jpg

ok, that's it. I'll update as I go if there's interest here, otherwise i'll just let this thread die a natural death.

I'm interested!

Very nice! I would be interested in you posting.

Well, the last week was somewhat boring in the IVB household. I got the vicious flu that's been going around, so that took me out for a few days. Then, I decided that I needed to improve some of the infastructure now before things got worse. Here's what I did:

1) Install a quiet (1.5 sone) bathroom fan in the ceiling for the media closet, vent to the attic. I'll run a pipe to the exterior wall this upcoming weekend. This alone dropped my closet temps by 8 degrees, and the fan is truly inaudible over the 2 HTPCs.

2) Build out a 3rd HTPC to act as the alternate zone video renderer [TV or DVD in Zones 2 & 3], and as the security camera DVR.

On a token exciting note, I did get a security camera in from tech-home. I got a Sony one, here's a pic. It's pretty dang small. I'll hopefully be able to mount this pointed at the front door, so I can pop up a screen at-will/on doorbell ring. Plus it's got infrared LEDs built-in, so it doesn't need any light.

I'll hopefully be able to get this all up&running in the next 1-2 weeks, and will post pics when i'm done.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/camera_top_size_blog.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/camera_size_blog.jpg

Yet another boring update. Hopefully life stabilizes and I move forward soon.

How shockingly irritating. My server has been flaky as of late, and finally died last week. As I had that lovely alternate zone machine assembled as mentioned above, I wasn't sweating it.

I ended up spending nearly the entire weekend moving cards & HDs from one to the other, and trying to get it up & running with any hint of stability. Everytime I thought I was close, BAM, another bit randomly started failing.

In the end, what was the problem? Software versions.

In my infinite wisdom, I downloaded the latest version of SageTV & CQC for the server. But, I neglected to get the latest client versions. I was running SageTV4.1.3 on the server, and V4.0 on the clients. For CQC, I was on V1.6.15 on the server, V1.6.14 on the clients.

I had clearance from the spousal unit to run all sorts of security, sensor, and speaker wires this weekend, and wasted it all b/c I didn't take the extra 4 minutes to download ALL the right software bits.

Man I really hate this hobby sometimes. [ok, maybe that's too strong. It's just so easy to hang yourself when you DIY]

You are retired, right?
Very impressive though.
I really like that floor plan with motion sensors. Im gonna have to copy you on that now.

You are retired, right?

I was definitely supposed to be by now. I'm 37 years old, and by now my stock options were supposed to be worth at LEAST $20M. [no joke, a few friends & I were discussing the various ways by which we would prevent our kids from finding out our true wealth, so they wouldn't be slackers. Who knew that startup consulting companies shouldn't be valued at $800K/employee...]

Anyhow, here's the latest blog entry. BTW, I just started a real blog at homeautomation.wordpress.com, for those RSS folks out there.

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Just clued in last night that my old IPAQ 3635 wifi PDA [original pocketpc version] that I never donated/threw out could be used in concert with the CQC Webserver to be an audio/HVAC/lighting remote control for those rooms the wife won't let me buy touchpanels for (yet). I ignored all the stuff tonight I was supposed to do and started playing around. If this works out well and I can get a UI that's somewhat usable, I can go get another 1-2 of these for the $15 they cost on eBay, and have a low-cost [albeit ugly UI] mechanism for local control until the wife agrees to buy something nicer. They're pretty easy to wallmount to, I bet I could even psuedo-flushmount it.

Here's what I got so far, granted it's ugly and is only a display of information. But, now that i'm getting the basics down, i'll see how to:
1) Render images, color the text
2) Add command buttons so that CQC will do something (i.e., turn speakers on/volume up&down, in the future could be lighting).

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/webserver.jpg

IVB, your PDA view has "Denon power" details for 3 rooms -- Are you controlling 3 Denon 3805s via CQC?

The Denon has 3 zones.

While I was running the security wire, I decided to also start running the mzone wiring in each room so that I could build out the attic storage space.

Then I realized I hadn't setup a screen to handle the mzone, so I just spent some time figuring out how to change my main wrapper template so I could also render an overlay in the middle that flowed cleanly. This isn't tested, as I haven't finished running wires or setting up the amps, but i'm sore from climbing around the attic and needed a diversion.

Here's the latest thinking. It's not easy to come up with a wrapper that'll work on all the other screens as well as flow cleanly into this one. I still need to decide what else to put on the top wrapper

You'll notice there's only 5 zones here. The 6th zone is the patio, and I figure i can put that in it's own screen easily enough.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_ZoneControl.jpg

Ran a bunch more runs today, thought i'd create a running list of what i've bought . Here's what I got so far. Ballpark price is ~$2100, but that's for a pretty full system with 40 sensors.

SKU, Description, Qty, Total
Base stufff (incl. optional extra zones & 2nd cabinet)
Elk-M1GSYS4, Control + Speaker + RJ21X + 14x14, 1
Elk-M1XIN, 16zone expander, 3
Elk-M1DBHR, M1 Data Bus Hub , 1
Elk-SWB28, 28" Structured Wired Box, 1
Elk-SWD1, Grommet Donuts for Box, 2

Optional Ethernet Control unit so I don't need RS232
Elk-M1XEP, M1 Series Ethernet Port, 1

Zone Sensors
Elk-M1ZTS, Zone Temp Sensor, 3
Elk-M1ZTS, Zone Temp Sensor with 7' probe, 1
Elk-930, Doorbell & Telephone Ring Detector, 1
GE-1125W-N, GE 3/8" Magnetic Stubby Reed Switch, 12
ROK-RG-71FM, Rokonet Vitron Glass Break Detector, 4
BH-ISMBLP1P, Bosch Blue Light passive infrared detector, 4
NAP-FW4H, Napco Fireworlf 4-wire Smoke Detector with Heat, 6
GE-240CO, GE 240-COE Carbon Monoxide Detector, 2
SS-5602, 194 Degree R/R Heat Sensor (Attic), 2
SS-5603, 135 Degree Heat Sensor (Kitchen), 1
SS-5601P, 135 Degree R/R Heat Sensor (Furnace & Laundry), 2
Elk-912, Elk Relay, SPDT 12V, 1

Some days I get to do HA, other days I'm asked to improve the existing HT stuff. Today I got lucky enough to do a little of both, but only finished the HT improvements so I'll post that. I did some work building up my Elk screens, but it's a pretty dang powerful automation panel, so much so that I haven't really begun to comprehend what it can do.

On the HT front, I finally used ripper's amazing polk images and redid my XM screen so that I can tune stations that I don't have hardcoded. You press the button, it shows up in the top area, then press select (the center XM button), and it tunes the station.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_XM.jpg

There's been some chatter on the CQC forums about the long lists of to-do that we all seem to have. I thought I'd formally write up everything I know that I still need to do. Dang, just writing this makes me tired. And to think - nearly all of this needs to be done before I can lay down the plywood in the attic to greatly expand our storage capacity, which I wanted to do June 10-17. That's a lotta work...

1) Run a 2nd 18/2 power wire from main Elk to 2ndary cabinet. I only ran the main power line that's constantly on. However, I'm putting stuff like smoke detectors in the 2ndary cabinet that need to be "switched" on/off by the main cabinet in the event of an alert, so the fire can be confirmed.

2) Run wiring for 20-ish more sensors. 12 of them are window sensors where I need to drill into the base, then into the crawlspace, and somehow divine how to get from one to the other

3) Connect telephone to the Elk and CQC so that I can have the CD pause if the phone rings

4) Rewire doorbell so I can create a naptime mode where it doesn't ring, and a daytime mode where it does ring. These would be selectable via a toggle on the wrapper

5) Mount & run wiring for internal speakers in 2 more locations where we can't hear the doorbell, setup Elk to send chimes to those locations when the doorbell rings [but only in daytime mode]. These speakers would also be used for security announcments [i.e., "dude there's a fire"], or to warn intruders ["hey buddy, you better get out now - the camera has begun recording and the cops have been called"]

6) Disconnect ADT and run the door sensors and RJ31X-main telco line from it into the Elk

7) Reformat one of my machines to act as a file server/CCTV recorder, setup & configure all software, test with the camera to make sure it all works.

8) Mount the front-door camera in a covert fashion

9) Mount & run wiring for 11 in-ceiling speakers in 7 rooms.

10) Mount & run wiring for 7 in-wall volume controllers for each of the above rooms

11) Install amps in a heat-friendly location, hook up to ZPR68

12) Switch over all screens to using the ZPR68 in production mode.

13) Run video wiring from ZPR68 to Kitchen & MBR so that I can render SDTV/DVD in those zones

14) Setup CQC/SageTV Server to send composite out to ZPR68, to act as a SDTV/DVD source.

Well, that whole list thing must have worked cuz I just had a shockingly productive evening. I had a pair of Niles CM5MP that I got off for $120 off eBay just sitting in a box. In the last few hours I:
- Drilled holes in the kids b/r, mounted them.
- Ran wiring in attic from speakers->media closet
- Hooked up Sherbourn 2/100A amp [$50 off eBay] in a heat-friendly location in media closet [top shelf, near top of rack, 8" below the exhaust fan]
- Redid ALL wiring that was going from 4 sources->Denon->2 amps for Zones2&3 to run through the ZPR instead.
- Redid screens to use ZPR. Basically I redid the actions to call the ZPR68 driver instead of the Denon, or in the case of Zone1, to call both of them.

I just got some Niles VolControllers off eBay to act as in-room volume reducers, but they haven't shown up yet. I left some extra slack in the wire so that there's room to run that, that'll happen next weekend. Until then, I'll have to use either the laptop or the 3400. [cellphone broke, so I can't use that].

The wife is going to Vegas this weekend for a girls weekend, so I won't be able to do much non-computer stuff over the next few days, but at least now I can chill with the girls in their bedroom listening to some tunes.

Somebody about how the basic wiring/etc was done. I'm sure I got a ton of stuff wrong, but the basic theory I think is sound. Here's an example sensor layout according to how i'm doing it. [not my house, don't worry].

Also, on the how-to, I just got 2 training CDs from Elk in the mail today. I'm going to setup myhomeautomationpc.com as a holder for any salient content from end-users as to how they've setup their systems, and will be hosting the training content there.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/house%20wiring.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/house%20wiring2.JPG

Hey, alarm guy tip...

If you have sliding windows, drill the contact close to the middle sash. Install a second magnet on the window in the open position to vent. You can now 'vent' the window and let air in while still keeping the system secure.

Most people do this in bathrooms or hall windows. I love having my sliding doors vented when it's hot.

thx for the tip. Haven't had time to think about window sensors yet, this'll explain why.

Please allow me to tell you how hard it is to get up to speed on the whole resistor/termination thing is for security systems. To be safest, you need to specify "end of line" for a circuit by attaching a resistor. But, you can't attach too many or too few. I can't currently get any of my integrated smoke detectors to work when they're in my 2ndary cabinet. People are really trying to be helpful, but they're using words like termination, RS-485 bus, 2.2K resistors, and terminals. This is even worse than trying to properly calculate Ohms on speaker circuits.

I'm hoping that my track record holds, and the act of making a post declaring that I'm confused will result in me immediately realizing what the problem is, hence making this post invalid.

Another wiring question came up offline about how it was wired up. Here's the answer:
You have 2 options when wiring sensors:

1) Cheaper: Run sensors in series, where you daisy-chain the wiring from one sensor to another, and run back to the Elk main board. This means you'll probably only need the main board, as it has 16 zones.

2) More Granular info: Homerun each sensor back to the Elk. You'll probably need some zone expanders based on the # of sensors you have. For example, I have about 40 sensors. The base Elk has 16 zones. As I'm running nearly all wiring to the 2ndary cabinet, I needed 3 zone expanders (IIRC, they're about $70 each), as 16x3=48zones possible.

I also bought the Data Bus Hub, which I'd highly recommend. That way I can plug each expander into the Hub, and run one wire from the hub back to the Main Board.

For sensors, there's 2 main types of sensors:
- 2 wire. These are non-powered sensors, such as window contacts, that basically just open/close a circuit. For these you just run 18/2 or 22/2 back to the Elk [either main or expander]. The two wires are either N/O [normally open] or N/C [normally closed]. You specify which one in the ElkRP software. (see below)

- 4 wire. These require power, such as motion sensors. You run your 2 zone wires as above, plus a 12V and neg wire. You can use a regular 18/4 for this as it's low-voltage.

The other thing to know is that you'll probably want to terminate your sensors with a resistor. I'm still learning the details of why, but it's basically to detect if the wires are cut [aka a burglar cuts the wires].

BTW, A cool feature of the Elk is a rich recorded voice vocabulary. Check out the right side under voice description - that's what you hear if this gets tripped while the Elk is armed. I just set that up - i could have just as easily picked another set of words to say.

Here's the ElkRP picture of the sensor type options.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/elk/elkrpsensortype.jpg

1) Cheaper: Run sensors in series, where you daisy-chain the wiring from one sensor to another, and run back to the Elk main board. This means you'll probably only need the main board, as it has 16 zones.

NO! Don't do it! Home run to the panel. You can terminate resistors EOL (end of line) at the panel, putting multiple contacts per zone. Worrying about someone cutting cable or the wiring being damaged doesn't make sense of the wires aren't accessible. If your wiring is exposed it would be more of an issue.

Good point. Frankly, I think that the cheaper option is a silly move in it's entirety as you're really only going to save $150-$220 for most installs. The additional info you get from the granularity is well worth it.

I'm setting up all my sensors to announce the location of the transgression - i.e., smoke in the kitchen dude, run for your life. No sense in just saying "eh, there's smoke somewhere. good luck not running into it on your way out."

3 seriously cool developments this weekend, one festering sore:
The sore: I still can't get those smokes to work, but i'm getting further in determining the problem. Won't bore you with the details, let's just say that the Elk setup may not be totally correct.

Cool item #1: I redid all my screens to use sliders and properly do mzone, as the ZPR definitely has a much slower RS232 response rate than the Denon and was a drag to change volume one at a time. I won't show a screenshot of just this, but focus on the left wrapper of the below shots.

Cool item #2:The Aprilaire HVAC started working again. No idea why - well, i did clean up the wiring a little, so perhaps it was a loose connection.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_House_Temperature.JPG


Cool item #3: I was looking for a clean & simple way to do 7-10 zone control, using repeating text was getting a little too busy for me. CQC has this awesome variable concept where you can use a single template to do mzone, but I never really looked into it until tonight. I'm not done with everything yet, but i'll probably crash soon and wanted to share cuz I was pretty excited about how this was turning out. Once this is done, i'll post just the overlay template so anyone can download it and use it in their own/their customer setups if they want. [the wrapper has copyrighted vladstudio art in it, so i'm not willing to publicly post that].

Check it out. Each room has an invisible command button, so pressing it brings up a different bottom image. It will also set a zone variable, so the source icon will know what zone to set the source to. I'll leave the on/off and volume to the wrapper, as it's all there already. I don't want to put more than one invisible command button, folks will be lost.

As I type this, I realize that I could make the text a little sexier. Oh well, i said i wasn't done...

The source icons will be hidden from view [or perhaps grey'ed out] if they're not available in that room.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Floorplanview.jpg

Here's hoping I didn't just spend $200 teaching myself about polarity, or more specifically, about what happens when you roll the dice.

My security camera server setup was going ludicrously smoothly. The server build and kodicom card install took all of an hour. That should have been my first clue. I finally unpacked the security camera and universal power adapter got from Tech-home months ago, looked at it, realized the documentation didn't state what the polarity should be on the power adapter. Spent some time googling, couldn't figure it out, so I figured, what-the-heck, i'm not going to figure this out via osmosis, so I may as well try one.

Got it all plugged in, no image on the screen. Hmmm. Wonder what it could be. I jiggled all the wires, no love.

I then looked over at the wallwart, and said to myself "Hey - why isn't that green LED indicating power on anymore?". I took it out of the wall.

Oh my was it hot. Real hot. Really really hot. Not burning hot, but hot. Much hotter than power supplies are supposed to be. Did I mention it was hot?

Hey - reversing polarity may not be a good idea...

Anyhow, Radio Shack is closed now, but I'll swing by tomorrow and pick up another universal power supply.

And hope like heck that I only fried the $25 power supply, and not the $140 security camera.

There's a good possibility it's fine. If it blew it wouldn't have any heat at all.

Did you figure out the smokes yet?

Not yet. I'm thinking that I don't have the expanders setup right. I'm going to strip the system down to just Elk, data bus hub retrofit, and 1 expander, and try to get it working.

BraveSirRobbin over at cocoontech gave me some great step-by-step instructions here about (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4346&st=30) using a multimeter to make sure all is ok. It'll take some extra time, but i'll teach myself how this stuff is supposed to work., so it's not a total loss.

Some day soon this will be done...

Great advice, get the expander working first with your resistor strapped out. Once you see the zone OK, then short the zone and that should put you into alarm... open the resistor and you should go into trouble. It seems that you are picking this up, attaboy.

Divide and Conquer.

Was asked by an AVS'er to describe my setup, rather than do it over PM/email, i figured i'd do it here as I'm also helping several other folks with their systems.

(Plus Dean & Mark keep harassing me to submit my stuff for the CQC gallery, this'll help there too. I'll do it in that format to reduce the workload:D )

System Overview

What's under control?
Home Theater
- Polk XRt12 XM tuner (via RS232)
- ZoomPlayer (via IP, for mp3 playback)
- TheaterTek (via IP, for DVD playback)
- SageTV (via IP, for TV playback)
- Xantech ZPR68 (via RS232, to oversee whole-house audio & SDTV distribution for 6 zones/8 sources)
- Denon 3805 (via RS232, for Home Theater room playback only)
- 5 2-4ch amps, indirectly controlled via 12V triggers & the ZPR68 to power individual zones. I prefer Parasond zamps and Sherbourn since they're inexpensive and 12V triggerable
- (Soon) Xantech EXP9 zone expander, indirectly controlled via the ZPR68 so I can do up to 15 zones. I'll only have 10-ish, though.

Home Automation
- Rain8net irrigation controller (via RS232)
- Aprilaire 8870 HVAC (via RS232)
- Elk M1Gold (via IP)
- (Soon) Indirectly control security camera system, via the web browser control.

System Layout
All equipment & the CQC/Sage Server & HT room PC Client is stored in a central location. Most of the Elk sensors have been run to a 2ndary cabinet located in the basement, so I don't have 40-odd wires running into the media closet when I don't need to,

System Configuration
There's technically 6 machines in my layout:

CQC/Sage Server
- Asus A7V600, 512MB RAM, 1+TB of space, WinXP Home
- CQC Master Server, SageTV, ZoomPlayer, UltraVNC Server are the primary software bits on this box.

Home Theater PC client
- Abit NF7-S2G, 1GB RAM, 1TB of space, WinXP Home
- CQC Interface Viewer, SageTVClient, TheaterTek are the primary software bits on this box.

(soon) CCTV/File Server
- Abit NF7-S2, 512MB RAM, 1.5TB of space
- Kodicomm software will be the only software bit installed on this machine. i won't install CQC unless I see a need for it. My preference is to keep this to be a clean CCTV/File server.
Wallmount Controller
- Fujitsu 3400, P3-400, 192MB RAM, Win XP Pro
- CQC Interface Viewer is the only software installed on this box

Development Machine
- Cheapo Dell laptop, 512MB RAM
- Full CQC install [except Master Server], Photoshop Elements, ElkRP, UltraVNC Client are the primary software bits.

Fancy remote control
- Cingular Siemens SX66 wifi PDA cellphone
- CQC DotNetViewer, and MS.NET 2.0 are the primary software bits installed.

Zone Layout
If you look at this picture (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Floorplanview.jpg), you'll see that I currently have 7 zones in the layout. I'll be splitting up Zone 2,5,6 into seperate zones shortly, so I can have room-level power-on/off via CQC. They'll never play different sources, but I can't think of a better way to allow CQC to turn on/off the sound in those rooms.

I currently use VGA to display the image in Zone1, and will shortly be using composite to send SDTV to Zones 2 & 6. I'm in the midst of low-voltage wiring quicksand, so i'm getting to all of this as fast as I can without getting divorced or having my kids stop recognizing who I am...

That's it for the high-level overview. Any questions, lay them on me.

After getting irritated b/c I had to be a contortionist to do my Elk testing, I have just completely disassembled the top 50% of my rack and my entire Elk setup.

In the last 2 months, i've added so much stuff to the equipment closet (elk cabinet/speaker/keypad, 3 2ch amps, Xantech EXP9 zone expander), that I had this horrifically piecemeal and disgusting setup.

I'm confident (sorta) that I can resassemble it all. I'm justifying this the same way I did when I opted to blow up my HA/HT server 5 months ago - It had been up&running for 3 years, first as a PC, then as an HTPC client, then as a server, and had gobs of junk on it.

Cleaning up/laying down the right infrastructure is just so unsexy though...

Got my new camera & power supply 2 days ago. Hooked it up last night, the great news is that I've got a great CCTV feed, works AWESOME in the dark with the IR LEDs.

The good news is that I was able to pull up a live video feed of my camera over another PC's InternetExplorer Window.

The bad news is that I can't get my old camera to work [you know, the one I reversed polarity on last week]. I'm feeding it 12VDC off the new PS, which is what the specs call for. It's center-positive, so it's looking like I just threw away $200.

The worse news is that I can't figure out how to get the live video feed over IE without going through the Diginet ActiveX plugin, which requires you to login. I want to render this on the 3400, furthermore via CQC, neither of which are easy for me to do text input through a browser window. There's zero chance of me hooking up a keyboard to the 3400, so I need to find a way through this.

I'm hoping there's a way to have Diginet take screencaps every 0.5->1second and post to a file, so I can pull that up via CQC on the 3400. If that works, there's a techie type on CQC who's willing to buy the Kodicomm capture card as it'll be functionally equivalent to his current system. Then he's going to reverse engineer the Diginet ActiveX plugin, see if we can hardcode a username/pw in there so we can bypass it all, and have what we really want - live streaming video through CQC using the Diginet software.

BTW, the reason we want to stick with Diginet is that it's got some great CCTV functionality, such as robust recording [scheduleable, on motion, on sensor trip], PTZ, and a variety of other stuff.

Love this thread, please keep us all updated. From what ive been reading on various threads, a lot of the software is still early and not 100% it seems. How old is this type of home control via tablet?

Love this thread, please keep us all updated. From what ive been reading on various threads, a lot of the software is still early and not 100% it seems.

That's both true and not quite true. Each individual nit hardware and software silo likes to consider themselves mature. Frankly, each piece probably is quite advanced in it's own right, if that's all you want to do.

What I want to do is stitch together each of these components into a single cohesive experience. I want to treat all my devices as engines, and create an interaction wrapper around it. I don't care to ever see my HVAC, irrigation, a/v, etc bits again.

The ability to play nice together and/or not need 4-5 computers on 24x7 is what's still immature.
- The CCTV software needs to be the only thing on the box.
- For touchpanel hardware, companies like TouchTronix make some cool single-gang LCD panels that use a PCI video board, but they take over the primary display, so no other UI can be on that box.
- Until a week ago, the best DVD software out there [TheaterTek] wasn't designed to be controlled, so CQC had to control it via 'faking' user input. This is 1-way, and doesn't allow for robust & rich 2-way control.

It's getting better - Touchtronix is coming out with a flush-mountable UTMA screen that I *don't think* has the same hardware/software constraints of their single-gang line. As mentioned above, TT is now controllable, there'll be an updated driver for that in the 4-6 week timeframe. It's all still VERY bleeding edge.

I can only do as much with CQC as is exposed to it by the hardware & software that I choose. The difference that exists if you go to a closed environment (ie AMX/Crestron) is that everythings been tested together, so you know that a good installer can make it all work. However, for folks like me who don't know what they want and who learn organically, by doing and moving and tweaking their way through the path, that's an expensive option as I can't ever "lock down" my requirements. Plus there's still bleeding edge thoughts that even they can't do.

How old is this type of home control via tablet?
I'd say that folks have been doing it for 3-4 years, but the last 6-12 months have seen a great increase in the # of folks as folks like me talk publicly about how we've succeeded and where we've failed, and how to set yourself up for success.

What a cool last 3 hours. I:

- Mounted CCTV outside, ran power & video wiring back to central location

- Mounted volume controller for bathroom, ran CAT5/power/speaker wiring back to central location

- setup CCTV server, confirmed that the camera works fine

- checked everything out online, made sure it works ok.



And best of all, it was all pretty dang easy. If I had a helper, this whole thing would have taken an hour. The only reason it took 3 was cuz I had to keep going up the dang ladder, back down, cuz I forgot stuff or I had to confirm wiring. I also wanted to go a bit slower, so I didn't burn out camera #2.



The drumbeat of progress is constant!



Not that it's exciting, but here's a few pics. I still haven't figured out how to integrate into CQC, but babysteps...

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/sample/frontdoor.JPG



http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/sample/frontdoor2.JPG

Just tested out the 3400 rendering my CCTV image via the web browser. It works fine, which I'm sure will make many folks happy.

1 Caveat though: I'm currently sitting in front of my 2.6GHz P4 desktop with the 3400 next to it, both connected via a hardwired cxn. The desktop reports anywhere from 4.9->5.1 frames/second, but the 3400 is holding steady at 3.12 Frames/sec. I'm not sure if this is a computer thing or a CCTV server thing. Regardless, I think it's "good enough for me" as the purpose is not to see smooth streaming TV on it, but rather to see who's at the front-door.

Maybe once I hit the lotto i'll go get a houseful of TouchTronix UTMA/UMPCs. For now, for $160, this is proving yet again to be a worthwhile investment.

DigiNet software visible through CQC?

Oooh, pretty....

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera2.jpg

Somebody mentioned that "IDE is going the way of serial ports". I replied with what my usage would be. ugh. This is wrong.


----------------------------------------------------------------
COM1 - DirecTV STB <controlled via sage, not CQC>
COM2 - not working

COM3 - Denon3805
COM4 - Aprilaire HVAC thermostat
COM5 - Polk XM tuner
COM6 - IRMan
COM7 - RAIN8 irrigation
COM8 - Xantech ZPR68 (6source/8z preamp for whole house audio)
COM9 - Elk M1, automation panel so I can tie in security
COM10 - DirecTV STB #2 <controlled via sage, not CQC>

I got my COM9 & 10 back as I decided to buy the $200 ethernet interface add-on for the elk [unrelated reasons], and my 2nd RCA D* STB died.

Everything is stable now, but dang I need a 2nd STB for 2 concurrent shows being recorded. Assuming I use COM9 for that, before I'm "done" with deploying HA, I also need:

COM10 - RS232 controllable FM tuner
COM11 - Lighting <either zWave/RadioRA/C-Bus>
COM12 - Sony 777ES DVD Mega-changer
COM13 - SMS Modem, so I can tell system to activate the "coming home sequence (lights/heat/etc)" via a text page from my cellphone, or have system page me in the event of HA issues (ie security alarm trip or power loss)
COM14 - Panasonic Plasma
COM15 - Video Matrix Switcher to send HiDef video to any room (either Autopatch, Neothings, Extron)
COM16 - Denon 2105 for Zone2 digital audio decoder

And, I haven't decided whether to hook the following up to the HA/HTPC server or the Elk. If I opt for the HA/HTPC server:
COM17 - Contact Closure to open/close curtain #1.
COM18 - Contact Closure to open/close curtain #2.

What a cool last 3 hours. I:

- Mounted CCTV outside, ran power & video wiring back to central location

- Mounted volume controller for bathroom, ran CAT5/power/speaker wiring back to central location

- setup CCTV server, confirmed that the camera works fine

- checked everything out online, made sure it works ok.


Hi IVB,
I'm happy that got your setup working nicely.
Could you tell us what types of cameras and the cable requirements (rg59 or cat5 etc) you're using for your security?
What equipments is needed to centrally distribute all the cameras locations within your house?

thanks

Hi IVB,
I'm happy that got your setup working nicely.
Could you tell us what types of cameras and the cable requirements (rg59 or cat5 etc) you're using for your security?

I got these Vitek cameras (http://www.vitekcctv.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductID=176). They're 1/3" 480TVL, with IR LEDs for zero-light situations. They were highly suggested by toymaster of CQC/cocoon fame for my needs.

They need an RG59 for video, and 18-2 for 12VDC. I just bought some RG59/18-2 cable from tri-state electronics, I think it was $130 for 500'.

What equipments is needed to centrally distribute all the cameras locations within your house?
thanks
Not following the question, so i'll tell you what i got, perhaps that'll answer it.

I have 1 camera now, just ordered 3 more of the same for each side of the house. They'll have all RG59/18-2 run back to my CCTV & fileserver. It's basically a PC with a kodicomm clone CCTV DVR card that can handle 8 video inputs. I have a 1.5A power supply wired to a PD9HC Elk power distribution module, so I can run all the cameras off the single power supply.
For software, i'm using Diginet which is a very robust CCTV package and designed to work with the kodicomm cards. It's got tons of functionality that's meant for situations such as this.
One of the things it does is install the apache webservdr on that machine as part of the install. Diginet has a web server page that they install alongside apache.

This means that any PC in your house can simply pull up the webserver on that PC using it's IP address [i.e., http://192.168.2.110] and the screen in the post above on 6/4 will come up.

What I got working last night was the ability to bypass the login screen by hardcoding my IP address, sitename, and password into the Diginet webserver page. [sounds hard, but it was actually very very very easy]. That means that if my wife is on the laptop or any other PC, she can just click the favorites link I setup in IE that says "FrontDoorCam", and the camera grid will come up. No typing necessary.

That's what I needed in order to be able to render this on the 3400, as I have that wallmounted, and don't have a keyboard hooked up to it.

Does that make sense?

I got these Vitek cameras (http://www.vitekcctv.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductID=176). They're 1/3" 480TVL, with IR LEDs for zero-light situations. They were highly suggested by toymaster of CQC/cocoon fame for my needs.

They need an RG59 for video, and 18-2 for 12VDC. I just bought some RG59/18-2 cable from tri-state electronics, I think it was $130 for 500'.

Not following the question, so i'll tell you what i got, perhaps that'll answer it.

I have 1 camera now, just ordered 3 more of the same for each side of the house. They'll have all RG59/18-2 run back to my CCTV & fileserver. It's basically a PC with a kodicomm clone CCTV DVR card that can handle 8 video inputs. I have a 1.5A power supply wired to a PD9HC Elk power distribution module, so I can run all the cameras off the single power supply.
For software, i'm using Diginet which is a very robust CCTV package and designed to work with the kodicomm cards. It's got tons of functionality that's meant for situations such as this.
One of the things it does is install the apache webservdr on that machine as part of the install. Diginet has a web server page that they install alongside apache.

This means that any PC in your house can simply pull up the webserver on that PC using it's IP address [i.e., http://192.168.2.110] and the screen in the post above on 6/4 will come up.

What I got working last night was the ability to bypass the login screen by hardcoding my IP address, sitename, and password into the Diginet webserver page. [sounds hard, but it was actually very very very easy]. That means that if my wife is on the laptop or any other PC, she can just click the favorites link I setup in IE that says "FrontDoorCam", and the camera grid will come up. No typing necessary.

That's what I needed in order to be able to render this on the 3400, as I have that wallmounted, and don't have a keyboard hooked up to it.

Does that make sense?

thanks IVB for the detailed response.
Currently my home is wired with cat5e for future camera locations. I know there are cat5e based cameras out there but not sure about the reliability/resolution these cameras put out. The only location where I can run rg59/18-2 cable is at the front door since I have a conduit there.
My questions are
1. can I mix cat5e based cameras with cameras you're currently using at the fileserver &CCTV?

2. Diginet? is that a monthly service where you have to pay a monthly fees for the webserver space?

3. I don't have security setup for my house and wasn't planning on getting the ELK distribution panels. Is there something comparable to make the CCTV work?

4. Are you planning on putting intercom system in your house? I'm planning on getting the Russound Compoint system when it's available and want to be able to see someone at the door when someone rings the doorbell. Currently, I don't know how that'll work since the russound compoint is strictly for intercom and not for video. When you get to that intercom stage, I would like to know how you're doing it so I can do the same thing.

thanks,

thanks IVB for the detailed response.
Currently my home is wired with cat5e for future camera locations. I know there are cat5e based cameras out there but not sure about the reliability/resolution these cameras put out. The only location where I can run rg59/18-2 cable is at the front door since I have a conduit there.
My questions are
1. can I mix cat5e based cameras with cameras you're currently using at the fileserver &CCTV?

Actually, someone just posted over on cocoon about how to run video+power over CAT5, so you can get whatever cameras you want and just put $13 balun's on the ends to convert.

2. Diginet? is that a monthly service where you have to pay a monthly fees for the webserver space?
Sorry for the vagueness. It's a software package that you install on your PC for the monitoring. Apache is a software package that turns that machine into a webserver, so you don't need anything external. If you want to view it from outside your house, all you do is open up a port in your router [again, sounds hard but very easy].

3. I don't have security setup for my house and wasn't planning on getting the ELK distribution panels. Is there something comparable to make the CCTV work?

Not following this question. If you get that DVR card on your PC and the diginet software, you don't actually need anything else.
4. Are you planning on putting intercom system in your house? I'm planning on getting the Russound Compoint system when it's available and want to be able to see someone at the door when someone rings the doorbell. Currently, I don't know how that'll work since the russound compoint is strictly for intercom and not for video. When you get to that intercom stage, I would like to know how you're doing it so I can do the same thing.

thanks,
At this point, not in the plan, however I said the same thing about XM and CCTVs :D

I'll wait until CCTV, security is done, then hopefully move into lighting, then probably RFID for the doors, then contemplate intercom. Hopefully an external event doesn't occur that makes me rejigger priorities.

Actually, someone just posted over on cocoon about how to run video+power over CAT5, so you can get whatever cameras you want and just put $13 balun's on the ends to convert.
That's good to know you can get baluns and do the trick. do you have a link to that thread? I would like to know how big the balun is and wonder if I can hide the balun in-wall.

Hopefully an external event doesn't occur that makes me rejigger priorities
You mean similar to the event when someone stole your Jap. maple tree? What a bummer to hear :eek:

Here's the link to that cocoon thread. (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4575&hl=balun)

Lest any of you readers think that this stuff is easy, I spent another 2.5 hours tonight trying to figure out why I can't get my smokes to work on my expander zone.

My latest guess it that i've terminated the RS485 bus wrong, as I bought the Elk Data Bus Hub Retrofit as I was planning on re-using my ADT stuff. Had I bought the Elk Data Bus Hub regular, I hear that there would be no termination issues. Can't speak to that - don't got one.

All I know is that I'm happy I took a month off from diagnosing this - it's killing me.

A big reason I went with the Elk: They have a dedicated forum on cocoontech (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showforum=42) where I can ask questions. That type of access is exactly what the DIY contingent needs, as some of this stuff isn't so easy to do even after we put some elbow grease into the situation.

I opted to pull the hub out of the equation, still having issues. Here's the post I just made on their cocoontech forum (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4668), i'm sure they'll respond soon enough....
--------------------------------------------
I know you guys have followed this thread (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4346), thanks for that. I've done another series of tests tonight; i'm missing something blindingly obvious, as I cannot figure out how to get my 4-wire Firewolf smokes to work on an expander. The Elk immediately reports an alarm.

Here's what I did, any guidance or confirmation that a smoke detector can indeed go on an expander zone would be helpdful.

Note: I used the ElkRP status button to tell me what the various voltages were, as it was much faster than using a multimeter. I'm happy to repeat all of these tests using a multimeter if you feel you want confirmation of the readings.

With only keypad & expander hanging directly off Elk, no data bus hub retrofit, or sensors of any sort hooked up:

1) Confirm proper resistance across RS485 bus, ie do I have the right # of terminators. 67ohms, within range specified by spanky
2) Determine smoke detector voltage on normal (7V), alarm mode (0V), just EOL on zone (7V).
3) Put smoke on mainzone 9, "enabled" zone to type 12 (fire supervisory). works fine. Measures 7V on normal, 0V on alarm
4) Put smoke on expander zone 17. Didn't "enable" the zone, elk sees 7V. "enabled" via ElkRP to a type 12 (fire supervisory), elk still sees 7V but immediately reports alarm
5) Put smoke on expander zone 17. but this time I "enabled" via ElkRP to a type 10 (fire alarm), acknowledged alert, reset smoke, still reports alarm.
6) put EOL on expander zone 19, reads 7V. "enabled" zone to a type 12(fire supervisory), elk reports alarm.
7) Added a motion detector to expander zone 21, works fine. Set to 04(burglar interior), 3-EOL Supervised on short.

So at this point, i believe i've confirmed that the expander works fine as a motion on it works, the smoke works fine as it works on the mainboard.

Can I, and how can I, get the smoke working on the expander?

Ok now this is service!

Within 7 hours, by 7:30am EST [which is where they are], I got the following response from Elk's Chief Engineer. I tried a few things out, not all, will do the rest tonight. At least i know it's "supposed" to work.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Have you enrolled the input expander?

You should be using definition 10, Fire Alarm. Fire supervisory is for fire gate valves.

If you put a 2200 ohm resistor across the zone terminals, it should not show alarm.

I tested the fire alarm on a zone expander here at my desk and it works OK.

Try moving to zone 32 and see if you get the same results.

You might try re-downloading the software in the input expander, else a problem on the input expander.

Within 24 hours of me formally asking Elk for help on cocoontech, their chief engineer shows me how to basically do a "reformat" of the Elk, which cleared up my problem!

The system now works using both EOL resistors and a real smoke detector. When I first hooked up the smoke, it registered an alarm, but all I had to do is acknowledge it by entering a user code on the keypad, then it all worked fine.

These guys rock. I'm so so happy I went with the Elk - this customer service is both fast and actually helps solve the problem.

I wish I hadn't waited so long to ask, but honestly it took me this long to figure out what the heck to ask and to try everything that a DIY'er should try instead of quickly throwing in the towel.

Now off to figure out how to wire that damn Data Bus Hub Retrofit...

Wife's priorities & my priorities begin to merge, albeit in an unfortunate way.

Wife's friends relatives just had a home-invasion last night. Suddenly PDA-monitoring of CCTV from remote locations, cellphone alerts on sensor trips, cellular backup, pushbutton "panic/instant call" button, internal CCTV pointed at the doors, motion & window sensors in every room, PVC protected phone lines, and generally getting the Elk up & running in "production" mode are now also her priority.

Glad I finally got that smoke working - wife's going to keep me busy in Elk projects for the next 6-9 months.

Wife's priorities & my priorities begin to merge, albeit in an unfortunate way.

Wife's friends relatives just had a home-invasion last night. Suddenly PDA-monitoring of CCTV from remote locations, cellphone alerts on sensor trips, cellular backup, pushbutton "panic/instant call" button, internal CCTV pointed at the doors, motion & window sensors in every room, PVC protected phone lines, and generally getting the Elk up & running in "production" mode are now also her priority.

Glad I finally got that smoke working - wife's going to keep me busy in Elk projects for the next 6-9 months.
Hi IVB,
I'm happy you got things workin out for you.

It seems that ELK can do many things you want it to do, I guess the problem is if I was going to go that route, it's not easy and it looks to be a lot of challenge to try to figure all this out by doing the DIY route.

You've just solved a big problem, and I congratulate you for that, I guess if it was me, I'd start blaming that ELK thing is not working as advertised etc.

Keep up the good work and updated progress :)

...it's not easy and it looks to be a lot of challenge to try to figure all this out by doing the DIY route...I'd start blaming that ELK thing is not working as advertised etc
I think you've hit the DIY'ers task squarely on the head there, and that statement right there was meant to be the purpose of keeping this thread alive: Have everyone see what it takes to do this, and determine for themselves whether DIY'ing an automation panel is what they want to do. Elk doesn't actually advertise as a DIY product, indeed they have everyone register as "installers" to drive home the point that automation panels are not meant to be a complete plug&play solution. Any manufacturer that tells you otherwise is misleading you. (Although I have to admit that had I tried "rebooting" the Elk myself 3 weeks ago, I wouldn't have had to do any of this and it would have been pretty darn near plug&play. I just didn't realize you could do that.) I see many folks on various forums rush to post a question rather than sit down and think it out for themselves. At least making an attempt to figure it out, then putting it away, then trying it again before posting the question is what DIY is meant to be.

This is significantly harder for me than HTPCs, as my dad is a PHD in EE who designed mainframes for IBM then opened up his own computer retail store. Hence, I've been exposed to computers since I was 8. [and i'm coming up on 38 now]. I started off programming at 8, at my fathers' store I was the best PC builder he had at 15, best salesman he had at 18, etc etc. But, I didn't know squat about wiring, resistors, eeproms, insulation, heck even carpentry.

Part of the reason I wanted to DIY was to learn that stuff so I could extend & integrate it into other areas as I saw fit. Just paying someone to do it is too much of a "black box", where I'll always have whatever instructions i gave the installer, and not realizing what else is possible. As new technologies and products become available, i'll now know how to bring them into the fold to make mine an even smarter house.

So suck it up and get one, and get down & dirty with me here :D

Suddenly PDA-monitoring of CCTV from remote locations, cellphone alerts on sensor trips, cellular backup, pushbutton "panic/instant call" button, internal CCTV pointed at the doors, motion & window sensors in every room, PVC protected phone lines, and generally getting the Elk up & running in "production" mode are now also her priority.

I just picked up a Uplink DigiCell 1500 to connect to my Elk M1G. It arrived, but I am still waiting on the Elk 981K (Cell Pack for Uplink with Transformer and Battery) to arrive to get started. I will be using the cell uplink as my sole means of communication as we dropped our POTS lines a while ago. So... we can go through that pain together.

I plan to use Alarm Relay to monitor... unless I hear anything different. I think their costs are 12.99 per month for the cell uplink, and 8.95 per moth for monitoring. So, 21.00 per month.

cjett

Cool, look forward to hearing how that works out.

There's a whole thread on cocoon about cellular backup (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4151). Have you seen that?

Nextalarm can also do cellular monitoring for $7.50 extra, and the uplink is one of their compatible ones. That's $9/month for basic service with a 1year contract, so $16.50. Minimal cost difference, i was going to figure out how to do a comparison between all these folks. Whoever has the (?best service? not sure how to rate yet) is what i'll go with.

Next Alarm outsources monitoring to 3rd parties. I have some problems with not knowing who is doing my monitoring. Also, AlarmRelay is UL rated... NextAlarm is not. Makes it simple for me.

cjett

Next Alarm outsources monitoring to a 3rd party. I have some problems with not knowing who is doing my monitoring. Also, AlarmRelay is UL rated... NextAlarm is not. Makes it simple for me.

cjett

Ah, very interesting - i did not know that. Does AlarmRelay not outsource?

That would also make it very simple for me.

Another amazing day in paradise. Any doubts bigpapa had about me being a semi-DIY'er were put to rest. I spent Fathers day playing with the kids from 6:30am [when they woke up] to 9:00am, then having them read me a book while I played with the Elk. Had a slow start, ended almost perfect. Check it out:

- Moved data bus hub retro & expander back to secondary cabinet, wired up all expanders & keypads in "production mode". After 45 mins, realized that one of the expanders wasn't actually working. Swore some, then pulled it out.
- Had lunch with wife/kids. Chicken parmesan with whole wheat pasta. Yummy.
- Bought a 2" PVC pipe from home depot, screwed up the cut several times, finally got a totally straight conduit run from attic all the way to literally the top of the Elk unit (only about 5', can't believe how much I hosed it) so that it would be easy to do the next step.
- Ran new fire rated 22/4 wire for ALL SIX smoke detectors wires from current location to the elk [via the lovely conduit]
- Had dinner with family & wife's family who came over.
- Used 2 of the prior smoke runs that went to the 2ndary cabinet for 2 194deg Attic Heat Detectors.
- Family forced me to stop for 45mins. Some lame excuse about it being my wife's birthday last Wed, and cake/presents time. Don't these people know i've got wiring to do?
- Used 1 of the prior smoke runs for a new motion detector.
- Rejiggered all wiring in the 2ndary cabinet to match the new usage.
- Turned on the Elk, enabled Zones 2->7 for the new smokes

I say "almost perfect" cuz I must have cut the wrong wire, as when I turned the Elk on it claimed expander 4 was nowhere to be found. I'm dang tired, i'll go downstairs tomorrow and figure out why.

Still though, heckuva day.

Ah, very interesting - i did not know that. Does AlarmRelay not outsource?

That would also make it very simple for me.

Nope - AlarmRelay is all in house.

cjett

Cool, look forward to hearing how that works out.

There's a whole thread on cocoon about cellular backup (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4151). Have you seen that?

Nextalarm can also do cellular monitoring for $7.50 extra, and the uplink is one of their compatible ones. That's $9/month for basic service with a 1year contract, so $16.50. Minimal cost difference, i was going to figure out how to do a comparison between all these folks. Whoever has the (?best service? not sure how to rate yet) is what i'll go with.

Checked that thread... thank you. Sent back the uplink 1500 today, as well as cancelled my order for the Elk 981K. I already had the serial interface for my elk ordered... i'll couple that with the latest Uplink AnyNet-C... as it's the latest digital version that passes the full range of alerts vs 2 or 3 alerts that the 1500 did.

So, a bit of a step back, but at least i'm buying the right stuff now.

cjett

Checked that thread... thank you. Sent back the uplink 1500 today, as well as cancelled my order for the Elk 981K. I already had the serial interface for my elk ordered... i'll couple that with the latest Uplink AnyNet-C... as it's the latest digital version that passes the full range of alerts vs 2 or 3 alerts that the 1500 did.

So, a bit of a step back, but at least i'm buying the right stuff now.

cjett

No idea what you just said, but i'll wait a month and see if you got it working, then buy whatever you did.

Dear Diary: Sometimes I wonder if I'm the exact right person for a DIY HA/HT solution, or the exact wrong person. Check out this bizarre thought process whence I came home:

5:15pm: "Dang is it nice. Getting a little warm though. Holy cow - look at the weather for the next few days; it's going to go up another 10deg, at least 90 by Wed. Man, I really need to ventilate that media closet."
6:15pm: "Man am I tired. But I best go down under the house and check the wiring on that expander."
6:30pm: "yep, accidentally pulled out a wire. Oh look at that - there's our old metal heat register grate that we pulled out when we put in the wooden one that we stained. Hmm. I wonder if I could use that in the media closet."
6:35pm: "Wow, check that out - there's a perfect location for the register on the floor in the back of the closet, where all the equipment vents. I'll just drill the 4 holes indicating the rectangle, i'll cut it later."
6:45pm: "Oh honey, you're going to give the kids a bath? Ok, I'll just cut this real quick."
7:00pm: "Ok, finally done taking the closet door off the hinges and moving all the crap out, ready to cut".
7:15pm: "How the heck did I screw up this rectangle so badly?"
7:30pm: "How the heck did I bend the crap out of this jigsaw blade?"
7:45pm: "Why isn't this damn thing fitting in? Wait a second - what the hell are these weird plastic bumper things on the side of the register - why in gods name would someone manufacture a non-straight edged register"
8:00pm: "Man, that is the ugliest most screwed up rectangle I have ever seen. Thank god the register grate has 1" of overlap on either side, so it's very forgiving"
8:15pm: "Well, finally all cleaned up. But, as long as I'm here, I may as well wallmount that magnetic strip on the other side of the closet so I can hang all my tools.
8:20pm "GOODNIGHT KIDS - I CAN'T COME TUCK YOU IN - IF I DON'T CLEAN THIS, MOMMY WILL YELL AT ME"
8:45pm: "Look honey, I cleaned everything out. I know I made a big mess, and did 2 hours of work I didn't plan on, but I also emptied the other half of the closet. Sure, you can put your sewing machine there - that's why I made the space."
8:55pm: "Hey - I can put my 4" RadioShack fan right on top of that register and suck the cold air up"
9:00pm: "Cool - the temperature fell another 5 degrees. I should go make another entry in the blog".

V1.6.20 of CQC went into public beta today, the coolest part is that it supports the new V2.3.2 Theatertek IP version.

Centralized view of what is currently playing on each source. I have another screen where I can see all zones (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=1633), I didn't put the source per zone there as before 30 minutes ago all I could see was CD/XM. I think I'll have to add this in there.

Oooooh, pretty....

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Sources.jpg

Next Alarm outsources monitoring to 3rd parties. I have some problems with not knowing who is doing my monitoring. Also, AlarmRelay is UL rated... NextAlarm is not. Makes it simple for me.

cjett

Just started a thread on alarmrelay over on cocoon (http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=4719&st=0&)

So interesting discovery on the whole competing HA priorities thing with me/wife. I was tracing my phone line some more, two interesting points:
1) Telephone Demarc box is actually in my crawlspace just on the inside of the house from where the wire runs. There is what could be the biggest hack for lightning protection - a wire not actually tied up, dangling loose, running over to a cold water pipe. What I thought at first glance was the box is actually just some jury-rigged mechanism for holding wire against wall. It's 12' up, so I didn't clearly see it first time.
2) ADT ran the wiring without an RJ31, it's just a regular extension twist-tied along with the other extensions. If we're on the phone or a thief breaks in, all he has to do is pick up a phone to disable our security system.

Wife is royally pissed about both my discovery about the ease of cutting our phone lines, plus the RJ31 thing. She wants to call ADT and get 5.5 yrs of fees refunded for providing a false sense of security. No way would that happen, as they could just say that "line seizure" is an optional feature that the prior owners who did the ADT install 10yrs ago didn't pay for, but at least now she's of the ilk that the Elk must be operational ASAP.

You don't need an RJ31x for line seizure if the phone lines connect to the alarm CPU on screw terminals. It's more of a convienience feature for homeowners to troubleshoot. A few alarm panels used to only connect phone through an RJ....

You don't need an RJ31x for line seizure if the phone lines connect to the alarm CPU on screw terminals. It's more of a convienience feature for homeowners to troubleshoot. A few alarm panels used to only connect phone through an RJ....

Yeah, but this one is hooked up as a regular client, like the other phones. Not fighting it, not worth my time for what is surely not a fruitful endeavor. Wife is more than welcome to.

Got a Cingular 8125 PDA/cellphone today with the unlimited PDA data plan [ie, blackberry plan equivalent]. This is mostly for work purposes, but wife also wants a way to monitor house/CCTV away from home, probably to make sure I didn't screw up the Elk install.

I was researching ways to connect to my CQC instance [ie, logmein] when Mark Stega reminded me that the CQC DotNetViewer uses XML to communicate with the server, meaning that I can just port-forward the CQC XML server to my external IP address, and hit it directly [ie, no 3rd party sofware]. Plus, I can use DDNS via dyndns.com so that I can use an english name that'll follow my external IP if my router resets.

In laymans terms, I set the config up on the CQC PDA viewer to hit My_House.dyndns.org:12345 [not the real name I picked, and 12345 isn't really my CQC server].

I created some regular 320x240 interfaces, and loaded some new fonts on the cellphone so I could use cooler fonts than what came with it. I think I used too many pics, cuz performance is a little slow, but that could be my plaster/lathe house too. I get really horrid service in my house. I'll try again tomorrow from my office in downtown SF, which obviously has fantastic coverage.

I can now do the following thing from any location my phone gets service:
- Check status of Elk, arm&disarm if need be.
- Check motion sensors
- Check HVAC, turn heat/fan up or down!! [that's really cool]

I still have to do some more testing, also still have to create some more interfaces, but not bad for 1.5 hours of work.

Check it out. Looks pretty decent.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Elk.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_HVAC.jpg

That is awesome! I have that same cell phone and I would love to do the same. Awesome job!

Do you have any performance issues with the Cingular GPRS? I'm noticing that all my web-browsing is also dang dang slow. As I'm not using IE, but rather the CQC PDA viewer, it seems that Cingular network performance may be the bottleneck.

Yes it is slower that would I would expect. But this is my first phone I have had that I actually use the internet connection so hard to compare to anything else.

cingular is pretty slow. verizon seems to have the best speeds. but you can always hop on wifi connection if you are near on open spot for a speed boost.

The Elk is in beta mode! Or is it called Alpha? Whatever, I mounted the 2nd keypad near the front, ran the CAT5e and hooked up to the system, and armed both it & the ADT system today before leaving the house for several hours! And, when I came back, everything was still fine.

The Elk isn't actually hooked up to the phone lines, as I want to run it for 2-3 weeks to make sure the motion sensors don't pick up anything outside the house by mistake. I've now got them in every room of the house, more for non-security reasons [ie, turn off speakers/lights/etc if there's no motion and/or there's no DVD or audio playing in a room for xmins]. But, as long as I got them, I may as well use them. Hopefully all goes well enough to give ADT 30 days notice on 7/31, then flip to elk live on 9/1. By then, I may also have enough time to put in a structured wiring system for the network & phone distribution and clean up the horrors that is my current wiring for the media closet, so it'll go live with the "right" structure.

I've got some "known" issues; can't figure out how to get both keypads working at the same time. I'm reading the Elk install guide, says something about keypad addresses, yet another thing that'll take a few reads to get through my thick skull. I also wired up all the motions as Definition4: Immediate alarm, rather than putting the ones near the doors as Def5:Follower, giving me time to disarm the system.

But, exciting progress nonetheless.

Progress continues. Getting both keypads was a total RTFM move, as it was CLEARLY spelled out there. I was just reading the wrong section! I also bought some "liquid metal" 3/4" tubing which is basically plastic wrapped flex-metal conduit to protect the external phone wiring from being cut, and a hole saw so I can run it into the house and secure it there.

FIinally, I started planning out some more sensor wiring runs. A CQC guy just wrote up a CADDX driver, posted his screenshot here. (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=1961) Of course, I had to show him the light of the non-scifi/techie screens, had to finally do that screen I keep meaning to create. This also helped me realize how much work I have yet to do, and but also how much has gotten done.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Elk.jpg

Just worked something out over on cocoontech, looks like my theory about there being "something" about setting up each room as it's own audio zone, and putting motion detectors in every room "just in case" will work out.

I'm going to setup CQC & the Elk to turn off speakers and lighting(future) if there's been no motion in a room for 5 minutes. The design looks like it would be trivial as I could have CQC set Output208on if the familyroom speakers are turned on. In the Elk, I could then do;
WHENEVER FamRmMotion IS VIOLATED AND Output208 IS ON
THEN TURN Output207 ON for 5 Minutes Restart if running

WHENEVER Output207 TURNS OFF and Output208 IS ON
THEN TURN Output208 OFF

I'll create a triggered event in CQC that says something like
IsFldChangeFor("elk-driver.Output208") send false to the FamRm ZPR68 Power (turn off the power in that zone)

I guess if I wanted to get complex, I could do an
IsEqual("elk-driver.Output208",False), but the only thing that'd be changing that would be the Elk.

Gotta love it when 2 seperately created, organically designed plans come together and actually have synergy...

Good lord; i just did a mini-status report to see how far I am with my wiring as I had to redo a few runs, I will be doing this until the end of time:

23 of 54 runs for the Elk done. [sensors, smoke, keypad, Elk speakers, phone]
2 of 8 CCTV runs done
14 of 21 speaker runs done
4 of 12 network runs done

That's 43 of 95 done, or 45%. Who's smart idea was self-installing this thing...

I got the Cingular phone working much better by upgrading the firmware on the phone to the latest version. Just in time too - had some raging success yesterday with remote access of my server. We had a last minute out-of-town trip to Napa as wife's folks were willing to watch kids. I added some A/V screens so I could control the A/V equipment and start DVDs, as they constantly struggle with anything remotely technical, especially if they're trying to watch the kids at the same time.

Here's the latest set of interfaces I made for it, had some pretty good luck with them yesterday. That said, I'm going to create a high-bandwidth set and low-bandwidth set and create a new top-level menu having you pick one or the other, as I only got 5-10kbps over Cingular's EDGE network while in Napa yesterday, and some of these are nearly 200K. They were fine from the coffee shops with free wifi, but about 40 seconds per page load time from the movie theater. I kicked off a DVD for the inlaws so they didn't have to deal with anything other than turning TV on. Considering that I won't use this that often, 20 seconds is "ok", but i'd like to see if I can at least create security ones that load within 5-7 seconds.

Obviously these need some serious GUI work - the napa trip was a total last minute thing, so the A/V ones are what I whipped together in <60 minutes.

BTW, these use CQC's DotNetViewer which directly hits the CQC XML Gateway server in my house, so I don't need logmein.com, and so no unnecessary software or security holes.


http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_AVEquipment.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_AVSources.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_DVD.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_XM.jpg

IVB,
I might have missed it but what thermostats are you using for your HVAC control?

Chip

If I remember correctly, he's using Aprilaire thermos.

yep. 8870 thermo with the 8811 RS232 adapter.

Also got some 8051/8061's in the mix for remote temp readings.

Did some performance testing/optimization of my PPC skins so I can get this to be a highly usable system. Can't do a heckuva lot here at home, as I get crappy cellphone coverage inside the house [all the plaster/lathe kills cellphone signals]. Pretty remarkable how much space even small images take up, though. I was able to cut download time of the first page I tried from 17 seconds to <3 seconds, and more impressively the 2nd one from 79 seconds to 11 seconds!

CAVEAT: This is a sample set of 1 run, in my current location with the crap cellphone coverage. I'm going to try again tomorrow if that pesky work thing doesn't get in my way.

To load this page via the DotNetViewer over Cingular/EDGE via my dynamic DNS took 17 seconds. If I've calculated correctly, and if 5 copies of the same 10K image means 50K of bandwidth, then this page is about 70K. That generally squares up with the 5-10Kbps I was seeing over EDGE, if you consider the signal in my house is greatly impacted and no cellphones usually work.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home.jpg

To load this page with no images took just under 3 seconds. There's no images, so it's about 2K. [just the size of the template]
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home_Text.jpg

Then we get truly dramatic.
To load this page took 79 seconds. I believe this page is about 125K.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion.jpg

Cutting out all the images, bringing it down to about 5K took 11 seconds. I had to add a TON of state-based rules processing in order to show/hide text fields, I may see if there's another option there which would likely cut that time further.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion_Text.jpg

I'll keep plugging away. Hopefully I can get everyone working in the <7 second timeframe, which would make this thing dang usable.

Thanks for keeping your thread going, the updates are great!

I have a few questions about the XM Feeds.
Do you have a XM source for each room or is one player driving them all?
Are you using Sat or players?
If one source, Are you able to play different channels in different places at the same time or one channel at multiple locations at the same time?

Thanks,

Mike

Thanks for keeping your thread going, the updates are great!

I have a few questions about the XM Feeds.
Do you have a XM source for each room or is one player driving them all?
Are you using Sat or players?
If one source, Are you able to play different channels in different places at the same time or one channel at multiple locations at the same time?

I'm too cheap for multiple tuners, I got the $200 Polk XRt12 XM single tuner. Hence, that means only 1 channel in whichever and however many locations I want.

If I got the russound dual-tuner, or multiple Polk's, I could easily hook each one up to a different input on the Xantech and distribute wherever I wanted.

Honestly, in our house with me/wife/2 young kids, we rarely listen to 2 different audio sources, even XM vs CD. I've got 2 CD stream capability, but I think I used that once 5 months ago.

when my kids get old enough to have an opinion about the music they're listening to, and don't want to suck it up and listen to CDs but rather want their own seperate XM feed at the same time that i'm listening to XM, i'll get a 2nd one. Heck, i'll probably suck it up and tell them they can listen to the XM, rather than constantly pay for a unique one just so me/wife can listen to something different.

Holy cow! I worked with Mark Stega [CQC guy who wrote the DotNetViewer, i *think* he's the CEO] to optimize this. He sent me a new build, screw going down to text-based stuff, he optimized the DNV so that it doesn't redownload an image if it's already gotten it. My image-laden screens are now quite zippy!

Now, the menu art screen (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home.jpg) which was taking 17 seconds, now loads in 8 seconds the first time, and GET THIS: 2.5 seconds every other time. [it's already downloaded the button]

The motion screen (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion.jpg), which was taking 79 seconds with art, and 11 seconds without art, takes 19 seconds the first time, 8 seconds the 2nd time and on!

Woohoo, no more text! I'm still doing some more sample runs, that was just the first run. Very very exciting stuff!

I think it was already not re-downloading the image if it already had it, it just quit doing the 'has this image changed since the last time I downloaded it' check unless it had been over some number of minutes since it last checked for that image. For whatever reason it seems like doing those redundant exchanges, even though the amount of information exchanged is pretty trivial, was causing a fair amount of delay.

I think it was already not re-downloading the image if it already had it, it just quit doing the 'has this image changed since the last time I downloaded it' check unless it had been over some number of minutes since it last checked for that image. For whatever reason it seems like doing those redundant exchanges, even though the amount of information exchanged is pretty trivial, was causing a fair amount of delay.

ok, yes, technically all he did was allow me to specify the time period that would go by from doing that check. Didn't want to get too technical.

BTW, this may not be an issue for folks on other providers. I hear Verizon has a pretty fast network. With Cingular, I get anywhere from 5-15Kbps once connected, and it takes a moment to get connected. Hence I need the absolute minimium amount of back&forth possible.

Also to set expectations: If you try to use a web server or logmein, there's zero chance you'll ever have remotely the same performance as it'll be forced to redownload the whole page. There's no intelligence a la the DotNetViewer which can do optimizations such as this. Hence, if you're serious about using a PDA cellphone to do remote access to your server, and if you've got anything but a wifi connection, either use the DNV, use entirely text-based screens, or be willing to have it perform slowly.

Finally, something that's easy. Both kids decided they wanted to go with Mom to pick up dinner, I went downstairs to see how easy it would be to access the front doors [outer & inner] via the crawlspace. Well, one thing led to another, inside of 90 minutes I had the floor and both doors drilled, magnets mounted, wires run, mounted to the expander, and confirmed proper operation via ElkRP!

Good thing the wife/kids decided to eat at the restaurant. Wife drove back up to see me with the outer door on the stoop, drill in hand. Thank god it only took me 15 minutes from then to completion, or else there'd been issues.

I just got the 2 doors working with CQC. I tried putting it on the current motion screen, didn't really work cuz you couldn't tell the difference between the green indicating no motion and the green indicating door is closed.

Here's a new screen dedicated to doors/windows. Not sure this is where i'll end up, it's just one of those things that needs to sit with me for a bit.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Doors_Windows.jpg

Dear Diary: This weekend I came up with a good plan to have consistently fast screen performance over the 8125. When I think i'll be entering a period of activity for interaction, I'll establish an Edge cxn via IE, startup the CQC PDA app, hit all the screens so I download/cache all the images, then do the PDA equivalent of alt-tabbing to the phone/calendar/etc. I put the phone back in the belt clip and resume my biz. As the PDA app hasn't technically shutdown, it still holds the images in memory. Whenever I want to check something on the house, I re-establish the Edge cxn, flip to the CQC Viewer, and play away. Did it this weekend, worked pretty well. Consistently got <10second load times on the art-based screens, which is pretty damn good considering it's 5-15KBps and over the Cingular network, and I was 50 miles from my house!

I also basically spent a long time running in place on everything else. I've finally got the office PC back to a reasonable state. I setup the geeks.com $220 P4, put in an ATI 9000 Pro half-height card cuz the mobo VGA was horrid, and realized it only had a 160W PS so I couldn't add another HD. No biggie there. However, the damn s-video->composite adapter that I had to get 2nd monitor running (aka distribute to SDTV's) didn't fit in the ATI 9000 slot, not sure wassup with that. And, I was having those issues with the TV holding sync before. This is seriously making me want to throw this damn SDTV out and just use a powered splitter to drive both a local LCD and convert the VGA->component, run that. I'd love to have a better PQ than a 9000, but I can't be buying yet more vidcards.

I'm also having fairly massive issues with TT, even outside CQC. I installed V2.4.1.0, which is a pre-release, thing kept wanting to freeze up on me. Backing down to 2.3.2 had the same result. I may go all the way back to 2.0 for a while, ditch the CQC IP driver until I can get the TT part a bit more stable. I'd really rather not, but we'll see.

So all in all, one tiny-ass step forward on the cell access, and standstill everywhere else.

Well, progress has been slow lately. Work has been truly horrific and political, and will likely continue to be so for the next 3 months. Hence, i'm in feast or famine mode - i either want to stay the heck away from everything and chill with the wife/kids, or dive into it and shut out the world. I did a little of both this weekend, bought a bike&trailer-car so 2yr old could sit in back, and get some decent progress on the HA side.

I got serious progress on 4 major fronts:
1) CCTV webserver working again. it broke when I tried to downgrade to Diginet V4.11]
2) Front Door cover MotionDetector Camera working kinda. Either I got cheap cables, cheap BNC connectors, cuz I had a HECK of a time getting a connection to hold. Plus, see the pics below, the image is a little funky. This part isn't done yet.
3) 3400 can now run kick off a show on another PC which is hooked up to a TV. Uses the SageTV webserver, and I can Play/Pause/skip from 3400. This eliminates the need for any remotes in that room (except for TV on/off). This is more cuz I got excited about the progress beelzerob is making on the SageTV driver than anything else, wanted to start prepping for that.
4) CQC state logic and Elk rules setup so that I can tell if there's been activity in a room within the last X minutes. I initially started with 5mins, but will probably change that to 15 once this is debugged.

Wife/kids are gone next weekend, i can't go cuz of work, so i'm coming up with a big list of stuff to get done. With any luck, i'll pound through lots, but that's assuming I don't get slaughtered at work this week and go into hiding this weekend. I've got still 4 cameras, Elk speakers & custom boards so I can play custom WAV files on doorbell/telephone, network&telco distro, and more speakers all sitting in boxes in the living room.

Here's screenshots of 2/3/4:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_SageTV.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_House_Motion.JPG

I'd like to say that I don't consider it a bad thing that rather than go to bed at 11:30pm, I opted to cut a hole in the MBR wall for the in-wall Niles subwoofer. And, I used a utility knife so I wouldn't screw it up and suffer the wrath of mom. [ok, kids mom, but wife doesn't rhyme with Khan]. I'm tempted to drill a hole in the subfloor, but the neighbors who's bedroom is probably 15' away from the location I need to drill, seeing as it's 1:15am and all.

The wife/kids are out of town, and I spent all dang night trying to fix my kitchen sink plumbing. First the pipes broke, I replaced them, now it looks like the pipe in the wall is clogged. I'm going to get my manual cheapo snake to figure out why, but seriously folks, i know even less about plumbing than I do about coding in CQC, which is basically squat.

I needed to do something HA/HT related, or else I'd have to get drunk to prove my manliness to myself.

If the wife is away, IVB will HA...

Good day today. After the
- 2 hour babble-athon which was the new CQC user walkthrough that I did for some of the new folks (and old folks)
- 2 hour kitchen pipe-snaking inside the wall task and realizing there were 2 blockages in the pipe, both of which looked suspiciously like something I had put down the pipe [i.e.,not wife or kids fault]

I finally spent the rest of the day getting the MBR basically done. This meant:

1) Installing in-ceiling directional Niles speakers
2) Installing in-wall passive subwoofer
3) Installing volume controller, which is really just acting as a volume reducer so that we can quickly turn volume down in case of phone call/kids beating each other up
4) Correctly mounting the Elk temperature sensor, so I don't have this dang wire dangling which the wife hated
5) Mounting an Elk speaker for HA announcements.
6) Searching for the dang speaker hole saw for 1 hour, then deciding to say "screw it", and using a utility knife to cut an 8" hole. Hey, at least it was nearly a perfect hole, as I used the template to mark a circle.

It sounds decent, but it sounds like there's a little distortion. Not sure if that's b/c I used really crappy audio cables, or whether the 30W x 2 Parasound zamp is underpowered, leaning toward the former. I have current issues with some of my Delta 410/mp3 sound as I has to steal the good cables for something else and put in horrid cables that I had laying around.

Here's as good a picture as I could take on my cellphone. Wife has the digital camera. You'll notice the subwoofer on the bottom, VC at the std 45" high that all my switches are at, and the Elk temperature sensor to the left, roughly centered. All this sits to the right of the armoire, which holds the crap SDTV that's in the MBR. I might get an el cheapo $500 27" CRT HDTV so we can really leverage this thing.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/subwoofer_vc_temp.jpg

It sounds decent, but it sounds like there's a little distortion. Not sure if that's b/c I used really crappy audio cables, or whether the 30W x 2 Parasound zamp is underpowered, leaning toward the former. I have current issues with some of my Delta 410/mp3 sound as I has to steal the good cables for something else and put in horrid cables that I had laying around.

I thought Zamps were 45 watts each.. maybe an older model?

Either way, I don't exclude crappy cabling, but I suspect first gain balance, then maybe underpowered amp, then maybe third would be the crappy cabling.

Make sure your source isn't turned up all the way, that could produce distortion. Make sure the Zamps input volume is properly calibrated also(start with that turned up all the way), plus it has a ground lift switch also that may provide some relief too.

I recommend a Velodyne 18" sub, it looks like it will fit there on the wall. Put a small tablecloth over it with a wide bottomed vase and flowers in it, your wife will notice the flowers and your impeccable taste in design, not the grotesquely large black box underneath.

Yeah, i got this is the V1.0 model.

No can do on the standalone sub - wife will straight-up veto that idea. Actually she already has. This was me "sneaking" it in, so I can still claim zero footprint.

I'll check out those distortion suggestions, thx.

ok, so now i'm getting pretty close to something cool. i hooked up the Elk-120 recordable voice module, and attached the elk output/relay expander, and put each speaker on it's own circuit. This means that I can turn on/off my elk HA speakers, furthermore I can play whatever sound I want.

Well, almost. I don't actually have the Elk-129 hooked up yet, just realized I need a power supply, trying to figure out what the right amps/volts should be. Once that's done, i'll have custom sounds/WAV files played back on doorbell ring & telephone ring. Finally, that'll also be the kicker for me to look into that whole "pause audio/video on ring" if i want.

I also created a UI so I could control the on/off from within CQC. I may record a few different sounds and create a page within CQC that allows me to pick which sound to render on doorbell. That gets a little more complex as I will need both Elk rules and CQC rules, not sure if it'll buy me that much.

I rejiggered the page so that on the zone control, it also showed some HA stuff. Not sure if i'll stick with this layout, i'll need to sit with it and see.

Here's what it looks like so far.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Floorplanview.jpg

Make sure your source isn't turned up all the way, that could produce distortion. Make sure the Zamps input volume is properly calibrated also(start with that turned up all the way), plus it has a ground lift switch also that may provide some relief too.


Great call on tuning the zamp - that did the trick. Not sure what I did as I can't physically see the back of the zamp, but the distortion is gone on the one source I tested with. Sounds a bit flat, I twisted 2 dials just to fiddle with it, tonight i'll go hunt down the manual and see which dial does what.

But wait, there's more!

A few of us are looking to integrate a recipe management system with CQC, so we can pull it up on our touchpanels in the kitchen. I downloaded both BigOven and LivingCookbook, neither of them seemed good enough for me, plus they won't allow ODBC access and will force us to use XML export/imports, which makes for a kludgy integration.

I downloaded mySQL and found a PHP/web-based recipe mgmt package [CookDojo] that claims it'll run on it. I ran into install issues last night, i'll keep plugging away tonight.

I'll probably just use it to see how it works, then determine the build vs buy point. I still haven't found a buy solution that works the way we're going to want it to work.

And that's still not all:
I tried pulling up the CCTV web browser interface directly on the cellphone PDA. I'm not sure if it's the controls (dunno if it's javascript or activex), but it won't work. At this point my options are:
1) Get snapshot images, pull those up
2) Find diginet PDA app, see if I can get that to work
3) Ditch the Kodicomm, get the Avermedia nv5000, which supposedly has a very nice PDA app.

Time will tell.

2 interesting entries for this weekend:

1) Recipe Management systems, esp those that integrate with HA software like CQC
Not a huge deal, but some of us have been been wishing for a recipe mgmt system that would integrate cleanly with CQC, so that we could pull up stuff on our kitchen touchpanels [or laptops that we bring into the kitchen.
I looked around at nearly every package (probably 15), didn't like any of them [incl. the "nice" ones like Bigoven, LivingCookbook, mealmaster, etc]. Plus, none of them had ODBC access, which is what would be needed in order to not have to resort to an export/import process, which means 2-3 steps before CQC can see the updates after you make them in the recipe system.
Well, I decided to dust off my 10yr old programming skills, pick up a few java books, and get cracking on an open-source Recipe Mgmt system. I had mySQL , so i'm currently using that, may switch to Postgre, dunno. Won't matter, it'll just be an ODBC cxn, the back-end is irrelevant. I'm only a few hours into it, got the db schema setup and sample data populated. I'm having some issues getting access via java. Then again, i've only been coding java for 2 hours, so I can't expect miracles. Hopefully I can display data on the screen from within my db within a few days, able to modify & enter data a few days after that. Then I can move on to fancy stuff like a real, actual GUI to manipulate.

Look for a post from me in the next 2-ish weeks about this, as soon as I have a functional prototype up. I'll need some assistance with screen layouts, workflow, functionality, graphics, but am willing to put in the elbow grease required to learn how to code, well, as much as I can. I'll sourceforge it so I can get other, more talented folks, to take on some work, cuz god knows I'm not going to be able to code that which i'm thinking.

As it's open-source, ODBC, and totally standalone, you don't need CQC. In theory, you could use with *Lobby, or whatever.

2) List of CQC drivers "in progress"
I've been noticing many threads on the CQC forum from users about creating their own drivers for equipment, esp since the CQC PDL driver format is so easy to write. I started a thread asking for folks to let us all know what they're working on, so there's no double-and-wasted work.

You may be interested in watching this thread (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2294), as it'll be keeping a running list of what drivers folks are working on. Folks are pretty friendly, and while no one can guarantee that all of these will be in the CQC product, almost every driver writer has stated their intention of informally sharing them and formally submitting them to Dean for inclusion. Dean, of course, will have to review each one to make sure it's robust enough for inclusion in the product.

Here's the list of the current drivers in that thread. Not all have hyperlinks to a thread where you can get them - that gets added as they're in a state ready to share. Until then, the list is intended to provide visibility to others that someone is working on them, so no duplicative work is done. I've listed the author's handle so that if you want to PM them and volunteer to help code it, you can do so.

Drivers in Progress, 8/12/06 [that's 12/8/06 for the non-US folks :D ]

1) AdvantageAir , znelbok
2) Denon 4806 receiver , bodshal
3) GE/InterlogiX/Caddx NetworX NX-8E , jscheller (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=1961&highlight=Networx)
4) GE 90-30 (PLC) , znelbok
5) Horoscopes, squintz (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2119&highlight=horoscopes)
6) Humax 5400 with ToH digital satellite STB, znelbok
7) InFocus IN74/IN76 , jonathan (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2299)
8) Integra DVD (all models), Mark/toymaster
9) Insteon, jonathan
10) Jandy RS Series Pool Controller, jscheller
11) LG LCD/Plasma Panel , bph
12) mitsubishi XD400U DLp projector, znelbok
13) Optoma H79 Projector, jpants
14)Optoma HD72 projector , bodshal
15) Panasonic AE9000, rritchey
16) Pixelmagic systems Crystalio scaler, Britax
17)Pixel Magic Crystalio II , bodshal
18) Resconsys (RCS) Serial Thermostat Driver, jscheller
19) Russound ST2-XM , ripper
20) Upgraded Russound Rnet Driver, Mark/toymaster
21) Topfield pvrt 5000 personal video recorder, znelbok
22) Upgraded SageTV driver, Beelzerob
23) Ultimeter II weather station, rhamer
24) Vantage lighting control, jscheller
25) Xantech XDT am/fm tuner, jscheller (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2267&highlight=xantech)
26) Xantech MRC-88, jscheller (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2141&highlight=xantech)
27) xBox, znelbok (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=898&highlight=xbox)
28) Yamaha RXV1600, (stefand?)
29) Yamaha RXV1500, beelzerob

And, in the hopefully beginning work soon so don't hold your breath but you can get excited camp:
1) Updated NetCallerID, IVB
2) Homegrown Recipe Mgmt system, IVB
3) Honeywell Enviracom communicating thermostat/zone controller, bph
4) Kenwood 400 disc mega DVD changer DV-5900M, jpants
5) Panasonic KX-TA SMDR telephone system, toymaster
6) Squeezebox, jonathan
7) CallerID via Asterisk PBX, jonathan
8) XMRadio Online, jonathan
9) Sony PFM-42B1 Plasma, bryanb

I got the correct screw-on BNC connector for my 18-2/RG6 cable 3 weeks ago, finally took the 6 minutes required to screw them on at both the camera side and the PC server side.

So the Vitek Motion detector camera in pic#1 produces images as per the next two pics. There's no night-time ability [no IR LEDs], but that's not relevant for a front door location. I've got that covered with 2 other Vitek day/night IR-LED cameras.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/front_door_camera.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera_front.jpg

Well, a modicum of progress today. Got some wiring done, made some progress on that recipe stuff, and let the wife know I bought a 777ES (trust me, that's progress).

On the wiring/CCTV stuff:
I got 4 more wiring runs done: 3 CCTV and the driveway gate [using a cheap magnetic reed sensor]. I got the CCTV mounted, but it isn't working yet. I completely forgot where I put the wire cutters, so I tried using small pruning shears to cut the cable. Add this to the fact that I had to contort my body to reach the eave, and my 4yr old & 2yr old were in the driveway playing while wife was at a bridal shower, and it's no shocker that the new CCTV isn't working. Driveway sensor works fine, which I damn well hope so since it's basically 2 simple wires and my kids "helped me".

On the recipe's via CQC side, I'm thinking that using Joomla & RapidRecipe really will be the best path forward. I got it all loaded up & working. I figured out which RapidRecipe tables i'll need to display recipes in CQC and determined the basic structure. It's only 4, so it's nice and small. Plus, I finally got hosting for myhomecookingpc.com at a mega-Joomla hosting provider that's got all these tutorials and forums about customizing it. This'll be the permanent home. I figured out which tables need to be exported, and I have access to cron-jobs so i'm going to have it cut exports every 15 mins [or more]. However, i'm currently having issues both manually exporting and getting a command script that'll work. That's the next step.

That site(www.myhomecookingpc.com) isn't going anywhere, it's open to the public (ie, non-CQC users too), so if you're interested in a recipe site, and potentially the ability to download a db (may be SQL, XML, CSV, or Excel, haven't finalized yet), you're more than welcome to it.

Are you currently using HD and streaming dvd's or is the ES a second unit? I mean are you replacing or adding on to the system? If you are replacing, can you share your reasoning?

I was about to start ripping my dvd's after being on the fence about an all digital vs changer config.

I'm currently using 4 250GB HDs just for the DVDs, probably ~100 DVDs or so. However, I've had several HD crashes in the past 6 months as they're beginning to age.

Rather than replace them, and given that I rarely watch most of them, i'm going to shift to 777ES. I'll initially move the rarely watched DVDs to the changer, then as more HDs fail [and they always do eventually], i just won't replace them.

The other advantage is that this will give me a vehicle to create more room for my HDTV recordings. The HDTV card has been out of commission for a while, but as soon as I get it back online that'll be another 10GB/hour. Freeing up that 1TB will give me more HDTV hours than I'd need. [famous last words]

Rather than replace them, and given that I rarely watch most of them, i'm going to shift to 777ES. I'll initially move the rarely watched DVDs to the changer, then as more HDs fail [and they always do eventually], i just won't replace them.

[famous last words]
Have you tried the 777ES changer? If so, how is the delay between changing disks? 1 second or couple seconds?

thanks

No idea, it's going to be here on Friday. Hopefully I have time to get it setup this weekend, then i'll report back.

I want to fix the CCTV first, then setup the NetCallerID modem I got, so there's a few things ahead of it in the queue, but i'm hoping to get that dealt with before this weekend.

The delay is about 10 to 15 seconds for me. Nothing like the instant response of a disc based system, but nothing I can't live with given the many other advantages of a changer based system in terms of practicality and cost and size and heat and energy consumption and time required to load new contents to it and so forth.

Progress on a mechanism to integrate a recipe site with CQC!

As mentioned above, I bought www.myhomecookingpc.com and put Joomla and RapidRecipe on it. I'm very slowly adding recipes into it. The site is running an export every 15mins to a file for just the 4 recipe tables. I used the windows event scheduler to automatically download that exportfile via ftp in a very simple NT command script. Downside is that each task only runs 1x/day max. I was hoping to do this every 15-30mins as it's a 10second command and takes almost no CPU cycles.

At this point, i'll probably put this project on hold until V2.0 with ODBC access to local datastores comes out as all I need is a local display mechanism. I do need to populate the site with recipes, but I don't think i'll populate with MealMaster data as it's really 99.9% garbage, 1% useful. I might put in the recipes we use heavily [south beach stuff, indian food, etc].

Also, anyone else is more than welcome to signup and add their own stuff into it. PM me and i'll give you the NT command script with the ftp login details for the site.

Got the wife to say "hey, that's cool". Gotta love that.

How? I got the Diginet PDA software working on the 8125 over the Cingular network, just showed it to her. Now we can pull up any of our cameras on the cellphone. It only gets about 1.25fps, but for this purpose it'll be fine. If I'm somewhere with wifi access or once cingular rolls out their upgraded network in 6months, i'm sure it'll be better, but again, not a showstopper at this point in time.

I'm contemplating setting up a CQC button to make an announcement over the elk HA speakers, ie "Yo dude, get out of my house i've already called the cops and emailed them your picture". Too bad I can't link the phone to the speakers, and talk into the speakers, THAT would be super cool.

Here's as good a picture as I could take. You can barely but not quite make out a grid of #s on the bottom left, that corresponds to camera #. The image is markedly similar to the standard CCTV picture shot i've been showing you guys.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/ppc_cctv.jpg

And here's the regular shot.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera.jpg

Feeling very irritated right now. I'm in NY, and for the past 24 hours, looks like my CCTV kodicomm server went south. It was working just fine, but it stopped yesterday. The nightly 3am reboot didn't seem to work last night, hopefully it will tonight.

I know CQC is up as I can hit that remotely just fine, but I can't get at my remote CCTV access. That system used to blue-screen on me when I was using an nvidia video card, but since I put the ATI 9800 Pro in it's been pretty good.

When I get home, i'll see what the issue is, but for now the wife was psyched that she could check out the house and make sure no one had mucked with anything.

At least this has underscored CQC stability to her as she can make sure the housesitter closed the outside front door via the Elk/CQC. Unfortunately she was primarily looking to make sure the block party tomorrow didn't have any nefarious types in our yard, or the punk ass college kid neighbors sitting on our car.

Great progress in 3 main areas: CCTV, CallerID, and automated lighting.

1) CCTV works fine again.
I didn't actually do anything, the machine must have reset itself into an ok state. It's set for a nightly reboot at 3am or something like that, so it probably just took 2-3 attempts at that to work. Got a great suggestion from electron over at cocoontech to put an elk relay on the PC reset switch, and tie to a CQC button so I can reset remotely at will. I'll certainly be doing that soon enough.

2) Automated lighting
For those of you who didn't follow the AVS thread (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=719955&page=1&pp=30), I got some great guidance from QQQ and audiblesolutions about the value of automated lighting, and whether HomeWorks or RadioRA would be better for me. I used to think that there were 2 main points to doing automated lighting:
A) Implement scenes
B ) Allow non-lighting events to trigger lighting (ie, I open my mud room door - the appropriate scene comes on if the security system is armed and it's dark outside).

In reality, I completely missed the boat on this one. Alan over at audiblesolutions pointed out that the real value in automated lighting is the ability to control a large amount of lights in a single room without a whole bank of dimmer/light switches. Rather, mount those things in a room closet, central closet, or other hidden location, and just put keypads in plain sight. That way things are cleaner looking and you can have better control. This really hit home for me as I have 4-5 locations where the light switch is VERY inconveniently located, and we're constantly irritated at having to go to a non-intuitive location to turn on/off the light. I'm going to look into putting the actual dimmer/lightswitch in the closet or even attic (so I can run a hardwire easily), and just putting a wireless keypad in the room.

I'm also ditching the idea of RadioRA and saving up my pennies for HomeWorks for 4 main reasons:
A) Once we remodel (in 2-3 years), i'll be at 45-50 loads minimum, esp given the above realization of cleaning up walls.
B) Ability to have hardwired & wireless controls in same system
C) Richer protocol allows a more robust set of control
D) Better options for shade control

This isn't going to be cheap, I hear MSRP on the dimmer HW switches is $270, but i'll see what I can do. I'm getting the feeling that this could be 2nd in WAF only to mzone audio, as we're all constantly irritated at our lights being left on and having to run around turning them off, plus the $400/month electic bill. Hence, it might not be so bad. Besides, she spent $300 today at Banana republic on clothes she'll only have for a year - these should last a few times longer than that :D

3) CallerID
I couldn't get the netcallerID driver that comes with CQC to work, so I decided to write my own. Besides, I knew I wanted to do massive upgrades, like integration with my outlook contact list, so I needed to understand it anyhow. Better to just write my own rather than learn someone else's code in a language I don't yet know. V0.1 of the driver works fine for the last caller, it'll get reset if CQC bounces though. I'll write out to a file as soon as I learn how. Here's what the screen looks like:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Callerid.jpg

Awesome day, even if I didn't get nearly enough done as I wanted. Clearly the hours of learning about how phone lines/telco paid off as it only took me 3 hours to:

1) Determine which of the 2 demarc blocks was main line, which was alternate
2) Pull telco line out of house, encase within flex metal pipe that I got from HomeDepot, secure to both outside and inside of house, cut the excess pipe [and dang, is it hard to do that]
3) Connect Elk RJ31X block
4) Run telco wiring to Elk
5) Mount Leviton 12-way structured media center panel
6) Run telco wiring to SMC
7) Jury rig an RJ11->RJ45 cable, so I could test it out with an analog line
8) Reconnect it all, and the phone actually works!

The one thing my research didn't turn up is that I cannot connect a security panel right off the RJ31 then send to telephone lines for distro if I have DSL. If I turn on the Elk, my DSL dies as the alarm panel is interfering with it.Here's a good diagram of how to do it (http://www.homephonewiring.com/splt-alarm.html), here's the DSL whole house filter that I just ordered from HomeTech (http://www.hometech.com/techwire/dsl.html#CC-SPSH70SR1) to deal with this for me. This is the "cleanest" way to go, rather than some hokey inline filter, figured as long as I'm doing this whole thing I may as well do it right. Also while I'm "doing things right", I'm going to move my DSL modem/router to the "right" location in the basement with the other stuff, not in the MBR like it currently is. All in all, the project has another few hours before I can declare complete. I wouldn't call it "over allocated time", as I didn't think I'd be able to move that router so soon. The wife is going to love that as it gets the MBR that much cleaner.

Here's what the outer telephone line now looks like. Note that it comes into the house about 4' up, so it used to be pretty insecure. That's what all the houses are like in our neighborhood. I pulled on it pretty hard, no chance that the average joe will be able to yank that tube out with a standard pull. I'm sure a pro could do something if they really wanted in my house, but if you turn to the right, our neighbors have an unsecured phone line and a 50" plasma in plain view, so my theory is that I just want them to move to an easier house.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/telco_line.jpg


I also bit the bullet and ordered an $850 in parts machine to make up for the $215 geeks.com PC that didn't work out. Clearly several levels higher than what I got, but I figured that rather than get another machine that's an outdated machine, I may as well get a basic Core2Duo setup. It's pretty basic, only 1 stick of 1GB RAM, but an Abit AB9 mobo with bigtime RAID on the mobo, and a fanless Gigabyte Geforce vidcard, so I can put it in the office and satisfy the wife's desire for quiet as well as my need for a 2nd video renderer.

Any progress with the DVD changer? Also, will you have to change your dvd management software or will your current solution work with the changer as well?

-Mike

sorry, didn't notice that question until just now. Got it all setup, works just fine with CQC 1.6 and DVDProfiler. I'm hoping to use CQC2.0 and it's media repository for a much more friendly experience, though.

Ladies (are there any here?) and gentleman (i know there's none of those here :D ), CQC2.0 has literally just allowed me to achieve my #2 priority from 15 months ago, when I first started down this route. In theory I could have done this with V1.4, 12 months ago, if I wanted to learn coding, but well, I didn't and was ok with waiting around for more user-friendly tools. And today is that day!!

In my house, the HVAC is all but unusable as the house is 96 yrs old and drafty as heck. We have to manually turn it on/off, even though we've got this fancy thermo and super-efficient blower. We can't leave it on as it's either burning hot or freezing cold, literally based on which way the wind is blowing outside and whether it's producing cross-drafts in the house and inside the house walls. Rather than attempt to insulate a house this old, our 2 different installers told us to suck it up b/c all the houses in our neighborhood are like this. I just used CQC's new local/global variable thingey and very easy to use command editor to automatically turn on the thermo, set it to 5 degrees warmer than it is now, and turn on the heat. [i need 5 degrees so the blower kicks in].

I'm going to set this to turn itself on at 7:45am on the weekends, 7:15am on M/W/F which is when both kids go to preschool, and 7:30 every other day. The wife is actually juiced about this, b/c it's always so dang cold when the kids first get up, and this'll be a nice alarm clock for them too.

Oh, and btw, today I
1) added a whole-house DSL filter that I bought from HomeTech, so I could have the Elk on without kicking out my DSL cxn
2) Seperated SageTV server from CQC server and moved the SageTV downstairs so I could jam it full of SDTV and HDTV tuner cards and stack D* boxes next to it without messing up an already jammed media closet
3) Mounted an autopatch for HTPC/officePC/777 component video sharing to my plasma, ran wiring so I could share it with the MBR TV as soon as we replace it. [on that note, it's beginning to die, so that'll happen soon too!)
4) Added an HDTV CAt's eye tuner card to the SageTV box, got that up & running
5) Built out some more popups using the new 2.0 popup template mgr. Man, that's cool stuff.

Here's 3 token pics, i'll take more tomorrow. One of the event mgr for the HVAC stuff above, one with a popup.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/20_events.JPG

Here's the 2nd/3rd. Pressing the blue source button on the left brings up the popup. Helps make the system look cleaner by getting rid of all the crap. Those particular buttons & colors don't necessarily work, but i'm sure i'll obsess over that later too.

BTW, the wife personally chose the fonts on the menu as she thinks go nicer with the art. You may also notice a slight change in the background on the wrapper, as she thought it looked a bit cleaner and more organic. Now THAT'S real progress and engagement.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/av_menu.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/av_popup_roomchoice.jpg

big hats off to one of my fellow CQC'ers (handle of Steve), my lesson re-learned yet again is "Use quality wire".

I was having DSL connection and speed issues(went from 2.4Mbps down to 1.2Mbps after putting the filter in), Steve suggested that I check out the quality of the connection. I took out the cheap, 22g I had used to connect the telco line to the DSL filter, put in some solid 16g wire that's so thick, it's a royal PITA to bend. I'm now immediately up to 1.8Mbps download. Right now I'm using a long distance cheap telephone cable wire to run to DSL that's probably 24g on a good day. I'm going to order some RJ12 connectors, I might be able to get it even better by using that CAT6 cable i've got laying around.

Live a little, re-learn a little.

How cool, how cool, how cool. Ok, well, really quite basic, but for me it was cool.

I got my Elk connected to nextalarm.com, got some phone hookup issues dealt with, and just ran the nextalarm suggested test where I armed the system and then tripped it. I then disarmed it, checked my account at nextalarm.com, and saw the following:


Date & Time Event User Zone
Oct 11, 2006 08:30:39 PM Interior Violation Den Motion (Zone xx)
Oct 11, 2006 08:30:36 PM Interior Violation Breakfast Nook Motion (Zone xx)


This means that the system is now really fully functional. I'll run in test mode for 2 weeks, and if all goes well, i'll terminate ADT at the end of this month!

Well, I was away most of the weekend, so my token hour or two of CQC time was spent mucking with popups and if-then logic. Check it out, not totally done yet, but seems interesting.

On the main menu, pressing DVD will pop up a screen asking you which room you want to watch a DVD in. If you select one of the TV zones, it'll allow you to continue on to the DVD screen. If not, it'll error out. Once I learn how to turn down the opacity of a popup, I can get it to blend more seamlessly with the underlying screen.

Not sure yet whether this is what i want, but if you recall my old screen where I had all zones listed, and only those sources valid for those zones, it was pretty busy and required lots of clicks. I'll let this one sit with me, see if it feels better.

I'll walk folks through this on the Saturday monthly CQC webex if they want to see the coding stuff live. We may have a limit of either 10 or 25 people on that call, so if you want to get the walkthrough, please reply to this thread. (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2687) It's first-reply, first-serve, and I don't want to attempt to reconcile PMs from different forums to determine who replied first.


Here's the flow:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/av_menu.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/av_popup_roomchoice.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/dvd_ripped.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup-zone-error.jpg

Here's the logic required to make it work. Pretty simple, really.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/if-then-logic.jpg


And this is the old screen.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_ZoneControl.jpg

I am so close to coolness that i'm drooling. Damn that I have to get up for work in 5.5 hours.

I got beelzerob's CQC-sage TCP driver working in 2.0, the theatertek TCP driver is working just fine, and I just created a button that intelligently determines whether SageTV, TT, or a CD is playing, and sends a command to the right one.

The massive difference between this and something like Girder is that I can actually bidirectionally handshake with the app and confirm that it's not only up, but it's actually playing something before I send it a command. This means going from reasonable confidence to 100% reliability. That last little bit is always the toughest, but it's what really drives the WAF and now it's done!!!

Oy, how can I be expected to focus at work tomorrow. I'll recode my USB-UIRT driver to have this logic based on pressing the pause/play/next/prev/etc buttons.

Here's the logic, it's pretty dang simple. I don't yet have a screen to show what's up/etc, bank on that happening within 24-48 hours.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/if-then-sage-tt.JPG

IVB,

Nice going as usual!!

I have started a Fujitsu 3400/3500 touch screen thread over at the new HA forum.

Maybe you can contribute once in a while?

Regards,
TCIII

Decent work lately. I'm still having an issue getting the Elk to communicate temperature changes to CQC (ie, the reason I put outside temp on my wrapper), but I'm sure the elk guys will come up with a solution right quick.

1) I activated my contract with NextAlarm, as I got the final communication kinks worked out. I still need to mount some more stuff, but i've already got well more coverage than ADT, so this just makes sense.
2) I mounted the autopatch and ran the cabling. My 777 isn't playing quite right with it, I don't get red sent over. The autopatch tech support (who are awesome and fast) suspect "that the red from the DVD player has a high DC offset. If another source works try measuring the red output for a DC level. If this level is +/- .6 volts DC this may be the source of your problem. If this is the case the only two options you have is to replace the DVD player or get a DC blocker to put in-line with the system." Oh well, let's see how that goes.
3) I finished up the first draft of the redo of my screens using the CQC 2.0 popups, cleaning up some of the flow. All 20 pictures are shown here, I won't bore you with more than 2-3. (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?p=37027#post37027). I still have the following outstanding bits to get done:
- adding 7day weather via a button on the 4day weather popup that replaces itself with the 7day popup,
- "What's on" screen, using Sage and TT TCP drivers
3) FM screen.

Here's a few of the screenshots, specifically the CD ones, as those were the ones that got cleaned up the most from the popups. I also put a button to a weather popup on the wrapper, as that's one of the most commonly used screens in the whole setup.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/menu_av.jpg
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup_roomchoice.jpg
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_cd1.jpg
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup_choosegenre_jrmc.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup_weather.jpg

October 25th, 9 full months after beginning to contemplate self-installing a security system, although admittedly only probably 10-15 mandays of actual dedicated attention to this, I've terminated ADT effective immediately. I just disconnected the keypad, and will slowly be dismantling the system. At this point, my Elk coverage far surpasses any ADT system I've personally seen, and I'm taking the next few days off to add more of the parts that are sitting in the boxes. [CO, heat, sound interface, etc].

But one day i'll be done, i'm sure of it :-)

I just realized how big a nimrod I am. I've been doing all this work to integrate all this stuff, and I haven't yet bothered to cross-link my systems.

I just set it up so that when I arm the security system in "Away" mode and leave the house, it'll turn off the stereo, any zones that were left on, and turn off the HVAC. God am I looking forward to automated lighting, so it'll turn off all that crap too.

When I put it into "Armed - Stay" mode (i.e., we're home for the night), if I've left the outer front door or the driveway gate open, it'll announce that fact which will prompt my wife to harass me to go close them. Those are setup as "non-alarm" zones, as the UPS guy might get ticked otherwise. I just bought a 300lb magnetic door lock, and i'll mount that on the outside door and automatically hard-lock it at night. That'll actually drive a ton of WAF, as we have what the left-coasters call a "mud room", where we take off and leave all our shoes. The wife is always concerned that someone could come in and steal all our shoes. We've got a lock on the door, but it's pretty easy to push it in.

But really, seriously, some day i'll be done with setting this dang thing up. I just gotta go find that cool "list your automated events" thread that was on this forum a few months ago...

Well today I learned 3 things:
1) I really am a newbie at this stuff
2) The Elk can call the central monitoring station quickly
3) NextAlarm really is paying attention.

I ripped out the ADT dining room motion, put in a cool Bosch blueline motion. Thing is, I set it up in the Elk remote programming software as a "Burglar Interior" instead of a "Burglar Interior Follower", which means that there's an instant alarm if it's tripped during the Armed Away mode. A "Follower" means that it'll give you a few seconds to punch in the code, then sound the alarm.

That's fine for most of my other zones, but the DiningRoom has a clear line of sight to the front door. That means that I need to trip the front door, then walk to the KeyPad, thusly tripping the DiningRoom.

I walk in, look at the alarm keypad, crap my pants, quickly disarm it. I think i've gotten it in time when the phone rings. We had a message already, so I only had 2 rings to get to it. Damn cordless wasn't on the base, and I missed the call.

I hadn't yet printed out the nextalarm info, so I go to pull up their website before the cops show up and charge me $250 for a false alarm. Damn DSL is hanging. I finally get to the site, pull up the customer service #, call them up, totally forget my password. Remembered it, called it all off, and immediately went to elkRP to set the type correctly.

Upside is, cops didn't come cuz I made the call in time. Plus, now i know that all this crap actually works, and so does the wife, who happened to be 5 steps behind me.

Well, in a fantastically fantastic long weekend, I blazed through tons of stuff. In the past 4 days, I:
- Mounted the rest of my heat/smoke/CO sensors
- Added another non-alarm sensor on the Basement Door
- Mounted/fixed 2 more CCTVs and re-adjusted the front door one after a squirrel jumped on it and moved it
- Used my Leviton SMC for the first time to run 2 new telephone runs. Given that we only actually have 1 cordless phone base with a bunch of extensions thoughout the house, I can now completely ditch my existing telephone wiring and go entirely with the new stuff that I've put in.
- And, most importantly, I mounted my new 300 pound maglock on our outer door. It's too weak for front-door/back-door usage, but for a mudroom door it's just fine.

Check out the pics. I had to use 2x4 to fashion an L bracket as the 300# maglock doesn't come with one.

I can now arm/disarm the outer door through the keypad that's mounted at the front-door or through CQC. I'm going to setup a rule in the Elk to automatically lock it when the Elk is set to ArmStay mode, and unlock it upon Disarm.

Most importantly, the wife is happy I got this done before Halloween as we can lock the doors up at 8pm tomorrow night, and the hooligan ruffian types will hopefully just move on to the other house.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/maglock_armature.jpg



http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/maglock_door.jpg



http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/maglock_closed.jpg



http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/wordpress/maglock_arm_outer.jpg



And here's the CQC screen. Although now that I look at it, I wonder if I should flip the red/green status, or perhaps use another set of on/off images.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_elk_doors.jpg

BTW, here's the latest CCTV image. I had to go to a 8grid view (3x3) as I'm about to put in the 5th CCTV.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_camera.jpg

Movement in a few areas, lately. Some good, some bad.

1) Still haven't gotten the autopatch working with my 777ES changer. Autopatch support is awesome - they replied within 10 hours even though they knew I wasn't the original owner. They helped troubleshoot it quite a bit, in the end their guidance was to get a DC blocker and try that. I picked one up from HomeTech, but damned if work hasn't sucked lately and I haven't had time to try it yet. Alas, my nice new(to me) 4YDM is still sitting there unused. This isn't technically a huge issue now as I only have the 1 HD zone and can use the MX850 to switch the inputs on the TV, but as soon as I get this working i'll replace the MBR SDTV with an HDTV and have 2 video zones.

2) I'm now rocking & rolling with my triggered events. I've started with automating around bad behavior. On ArmAway, the denon, all audio zones, and the HVAC get turned off. On ArmStay, the door maglock gets armed. I also pretty much finished the MX850 setup so that when I press pause, CQC determines whether i'm watching SageTV/TheaterTek/777, and sends the pause to the right line. That took some mucking with due to how SageTV and the 777 report status when they're up but not in-use.

3) I started reripping all my CDs with CQC. I ripped all 350+ of them 3 years ago, but that's when I didn't know from lossless formats, and I ripped to mp3. The mistake I made was to listen to some lossless formats, and now anything else is quite noticeable. Alas, I was better fat, dumb, and happy. I got a Sony 200 disc firewire changer as there'll be an auto-rip utility for that soon enough, but given the speed of the new Core2 Duo machine i'm using, this may be done before the drive is.

4) On the bad movement side, I just found out that my HomeWorks lighting project is competing for funding with some kitchen stuff. No joke, my wife wants to buy a $3K-$5K range hood. Not the range, just the dang hood that goes over it. Dunno what's wrong with the fan we got now. Plus, the primary source of funding is an investment that has dropped 25% in the past 3 weeks, Dow-at-a-high-my-a$$.
The wife doesn't think automated lighting is a value-add activity, even when I explained Alan's "but we can centralize all the new loads we'll run and use keypads" approach. So I'm on to Plan B. I'm going to put in a handful of zWave stuff, and get some basic stuff working. It's pretty cheap - $35/switch. Mark (CQC CEO) is potentially rewriting the whole zWave integration in Q1 to make it much more robust, esp given that some of the newer zWave controllers haven't been playing nice with CQC. I figure I can probably get 15-20 switches and 2-3 keypads for <<$1K. Even if it isn't 100% stable or reliable, as long as the manual usage works and the lights don't randomly come on at the wrong time, I can show her the value. Then, when she's hooked as she always ends up being, I can tell her that if she's interested in serious reliability, she'll have to accept a cheaper range hood so we'll have the room under the budget cap to pay for it.

5) On the ludicrously bad news side, in retrospect I have been colossally stupid building a new office PC using a new Core2Duo cpu, and making that a dual-purpose office PC and CQC server. Not b/c it can't handle the load, it barely notices, but because I didn't realize my wife has a habit of installing crap on that machine. I've been stable for so long, primarily b/c I used to have a headless SageTV/CQC server box that was almost never directly touched. I came home on Friday, and the Core2 server was throwing all these generic services svchost issues. Upon examination, the wife had installed some strange photo software on it and some other things "to make her life easier". Well, there's a distinct possibility I have to rebuild that whole freakin' thing. Serves me right for not treating my automation controller like a piece of "must not be touched, mission critical" piece of equipment.

Oh, and this is also where I mention that I installed Ghost on that box, but never actually made a backup. Dang, dang, dang.

I'm probably going to go back to a CQC/SageTV Master server machine, but i'll keep the CQC portion to just be the Master Server running the events system, interface manager, etc. I've currently got an HTPC client that houses all the mzone hardware and software drivers, i'll leave that be. I'll also keep that office PC as a CQC server so I can have 2 concurrent HD video sources if me/wife want to watch different TV shows or DVDs in different rooms concurrently.

So, tha's where I'm at. Never a dull moment. If I can get zWave up & running, I think i'm going to take a 2-3 month break from installing new HA stuff and do some of the attic buildout I've been planning. Expanding storage space up there is sure to get me some WAF points that I could spend on, say, installing a voice-recognition hardware setup next summer/fall...

Two words: Woo (almost) to the Hoo!

Got my zWave stuff in, mounted. Had 1 bad switch out of 5, but the lamp module & external screw-in thingey were fine. I've now got 6 functioning zWave lights. And, get this: They work via CQC, and, in the case of my Entry Light, through my Elk Kepad! Wife is very juiced b/c in order to overcome some horrific wiring, we had to leave power on all the time to the fixture and use a pullstring FUGLY fixture on it. So ugly so ugly so ugly.

I setup the F6 button on the Elk Keypad to be a toggle for the entry light.

I am having a pretty serious issue with stability of the system in that 1-2 of the switches are constantly losing it's connection to CQC, but I suspect that I don't have enough installed given that it's a mesh network thing. Now that I know that this can work, i'll order another 8-12 switches tomorrow and install them. That should greatly enhance the performance of my setup. Only time will tell what the mid-term stability of this is, hopefully it's good enough to last and be operational for at least 3-6 months or so.

Don't get me wrong - I still want to put in HomeWorks, it's just that I need to show the wife that you can use a lighting control system for both ease of use (overcome bad wiring design, turn off all lights upon security arm, etc), and for security (Turn on & off all lights upon intrusion, do not allow the blinking to stop unless, well, i'll think of someting). We had another mugging last week, not much an automation system can do about random stuff, but at least we can bring attention to the house when it's unoccupied if folks try and break in.)

Here's the screen I came up with. Given that this is a temporary solution, I'll probably limit myself to 20-ish switches & appliance control modules. That's only $700-$800 from automatedoutlet, so it's a good investment in learning what I'd actually want from a robust platform like Homeworks. Each of the grey/yellow buttons are actually on/off buttons, plus there's the "all-off" in the middle of the screen. I can fit 14 dimmers at the bottom. The up&down buttons change the level by 10% per shot, with a halt at 0% and 99% given those are the zWave bounds.

Furthermore, I used the cool if-then logic in the V2.0/CQC to take whatever the current value is and extend that. This means that if someone manually changes that level, I don't care.

IIRC, determining current dimmer level isn't possible in RadioRA, so that ability immediately makes me glad I didn't go that route. Either go long or go home...

Here's the code, again all entirely done with point&click, I just had to type in the variable names.

[OnClick]
LocalVars::SetVariable(LVar:CurVal, $(sample-zwave-ACT.LivRm))
LocalVars::Add(LVar:CurVal, 10)
If System::GrThan(%(LVar:CurVal), 99)
LocalVars::SetVariable(LVar:CurVal, 99)
End
Devices::FieldWrite(sample-zwave-ACT.LivRm, %(LVar:CurVal))



Finally, here's that screenshot. BTW, I'll be putting this in it's entirety into that non-art downloadable CQC template pack I got given that there's nothing copyrighted in it. (just ripper's awesome Insteon image, which I photoshopped to fit)

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/Overlay_Lights_Status.jpg

Ok, now we're starting to hit some serious MAF. (again, that's my acceptance factor). A little WAF too.

We've got an MBR closet that has no light in it. Why, I have no idea. But, we've had this stupid table lamp on an extension cord in there, and we have to reach in and turn it on every time we open the door to look in. We don't need the light 100% of the time, but a solid 75% as it doesn't get much direct light. I swear every time I open that up as it's just such a hack, esp since the on/off switch isn't really conveniently located. So, I got to thinking - i've got an Elk, I've got CQC, and now i've got zWave, why not integrate this stuff and fix my dang problem.

Well, all these wiring runs are starting to show in terms of experience. I just took 15 mins to drill a hole in the floor of the MBRCloset where the door is, mount a magnetic switch, run it to the Elk 2ndary cabinet. I then took another 10 mins went into CQC, setup a trigger on that zone that'll turn off the MBRCloset light if the door is closed, turn it on when the door is open. Ok, that part shouldn't have taken 10 mins, but it took me way too long to realize that I was triggering on the wrong elk zone (ie, wasn't looking at the right field).

There is a but. I have had many many timeouts between CQC & zWave, but I'm really thinking it's b/c the USB controller has to go 15' through a 4" to the nearest switch, and the next one is another 10' away. I ordered another 10 HA06C zWave switches and 2 external lamp modules, (2day UPS to boot), once those are mounted i'll have a 20-switch network including 2 switches 7' away through air from the controller, and 4 more switches literally just above the USB controller. That's as much as I can do to make this a decent network given that there is no RF repeater concept a la Homeworks RF.

Something must have been in the turkey, because all kinds of things are finally being absorbed today. I finally clued in as to what the heck Dean/MarkStega/jonathan were talking about when they said "learn how to use the variables driver - it's damn powerful".

I just tried using it for real, ok, i publicly hereby admit that it took me far too long to realize that this is actually what I wanted all along and that I was wrong and that you guys were right.

I've been looking for a way to use the same UI that I use for everything else to enable/disable my events. Specifically, my irrigation system is the current angst.

So, I created 2 variables in the variable driver called active_hvac and active_irrigation - I can use that to transfer info from the IV to the event manager. This has enabled me to do the following screen.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_admin.jpg

Then, inside the "Start Sprinklers" action, I added an if-then statement around the whole thing testing for true or false.

If System::Equals($(sample-variables-driver.Act..., True)
Devices::FieldWrite(sample-rain8net.1_Zone_1, True)
Devices::FieldWrite(sample-rain8net.1_Zone_2, True)
Devices::FieldWrite(sample-rain8net.1_Zone_3, True)
End


Pretty nifty, huh? I realize how much more powerful this package every time I turn around - some day I'll actually understand it.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_lights_status.jpg

And the beat goes on. Mounted another 4 switches today. Helped a little with the network, but still having issues maybe 35% of the time (down from 50). I've got another 6 I can easily mount, if that doesn't help I'll try relocating the USB controller. If basic repointing doesn't work, i'll try moving it to the mainfloor. That's going to suck, cuz it's currently below a 4" subfloor, under the MBR, and i'll have to drill a hole to mount it. I'll be able to put it in a hidden location, but it's still going to cost WAF points if that's where it ends up having to be.

All in all, yet another demonstration that as soon as I can afford a "real" solution like HomeWorks, I'll do that.

IVB - going back to ~post 38 of this thread, I heard the Audrey IR keyboard works out of the box with the 3400. Not sure if you've already discovered this already...

Thanks for that tip. I should look into that, would help me avoid pulling it out of the wallmount and putting into dock just to upgrade the CQC client.

this was my to-do list on 5/4/06

1) Run a 2nd 18/2 power wire from main Elk to 2ndary cabinet.
2) Run wiring for 20-ish more sensors.
3) Connect telephone to the Elk and CQC so that I can have the CD pause if the phone rings
4) Rewire doorbell so I can create a naptime mode where it doesn't ring, and a daytime mode where it does ring. These would be selectable via a toggle on the wrapper
5) Mount & run wiring for internal speakers in 2 more locations where we can't hear the doorbell, setup Elk to send chimes to those locations when the doorbell rings [but only in daytime mode]. These speakers would also be used for security announcments [i.e., "dude there's a fire"], or to warn intruders ["hey buddy, you better get out now - the camera has begun recording and the cops have been called"]

6) Disconnect ADT and run the door sensors and RJ31X-main telco line from it into the Elk

7) Reformat one of my machines to act as a file server/CCTV recorder, setup & configure all software, test with the camera to make sure it all works.

8) Mount the front-door camera in a covert fashion

9) Mount & run wiring for 11 in-ceiling speakers in 7 rooms.

10) Mount & run wiring for 7 in-wall volume controllers for each of the above rooms

11) Install amps in a heat-friendly location, hook up to ZPR68

12) Switch over all screens to using the ZPR68 in production mode.

13) Run video wiring from ZPR68 to Kitchen & MBR so that I can render SDTV/DVD in those zones

14) Setup CQC/SageTV Server to send composite out to ZPR68, to act as a SDTV/DVD source.
Well, 7 months later, i'm shockingly done with many items on the list. Still didn't finish wiring the initially planned sensors, but i did probably 15 other/new ones so that's a wash. The only thing I deprioritized was the telephone/doorbell thing. Also, the ZPR68 isn't working with composite video, but given that I'm tossing all my SDTV's cuz i'm sick of PC sync issues, that's irrelevant. Plus I accomplished much more that's not even on the list, like:
1) maglock installation
2) zWave lighting (11 mounted so far, 8 to go)
3) Elk->zWave integration (ie light on via keypad or closet door open)
4) many more cameras mounted than planned

So here's my new list. Rather than timebox this, i'll just say "2007". I have a feeling i'll want to take a break from adding new stuff for at least 5-7 days after the first item (stable zWave).
Will do:
1) Mount 2nd 8870 in KBR, setup CQC to turn T1 off at 8pm and turn T2 on, then flip control at 8am.
2) Stabilized lighting control via zWave, install remaining switches.
3) 2nd HDTV, distributed HDTV via the autopatch
4) Link both TVs via RS232 for auto-off. Both TVs will be commercial Panny plasmas. (i'm already exchanging my current consumer one with my F.I.L. who has a commercial that's the same age but wants one with speakers. )
5) Maglock all doors in an invisible (or nearly invisible) fashion.
6) Electric Door Strike on select doors.
7) Mount Proximity sensor that I already bought on one door (http://www.automatedoutlet.com/product.php?productid=867&cat=0&page=1)
8) Mount pin/prox reader on front door, link to electric door strike so a pin code could open door
9) Get a wireless keyfob (http://www.automatedoutlet.com/product.php?productid=394&cat=159&page=1) and receiver so wife can turn on lights/etc when she approaches house.

Would like to do:
10) RFID control. Not necessarily for security, potentially for lighting, but not sure how realistic carrying an RFID card around is going to be.
11) VR. Now THIS would be useful - I'd love to be able to walk into the entry and just say "lights on" or "open door, disarm". I wouldn't put it all over the house, as i'd prefer to not spend $4K on a Gentner mixer. the entry is perfect, as we could force kids to be quiet to avoid ambient noise.

I guess once I get through that list, then I can really focus on automating my home.

Was looking to take steps to beef up the zWave mesh this weekend. Went to move a few light fixtures and put zWave switches in, and my dang 96yr old wiring started disintegrating in my hand. It's pretty well shielded in rubber/yarn, but the rubber is old and didn't take well to being moved several inches and stripped.

I could have worked slower and more carefully, but the wiring isn't in the right location anyhow, so i'm going to rip it all out and do it all "correctly". Well, i'll mount the gangbox and get a licensed electrician to do the HV work. And, as long as i'm calling him in, i'll re-route several switches.

So net net: I have a feeling it'll be a few more weeks before I can properly beef up the mesh in the weakest part of my network. I'm getting a few plug-in appliance modules, i may try and put those in an outlet nearby w/o anything actually plugged in as a stopgap measure.

One token good thing: The latest iteration of the CQC zWave driver has a little more error checking for bad environments like mine, so the setup as a whole is more stable. Obviously I'd prefer that my software not be forced to work around bad network architecture as it's driving up my latency/etc, but at least it's usable. I still think that for $1K, this will be a very useful learning experience.

Well, my kids have now woken me up 30+mins before CQC started the HVAC for the last 3 days. 2 days ago I tried starting the heat manually from the 3400, but the dang buttons were too small for my half-closed eyes.

I just coded up this screen with some seriously huge buttons, so even i could hit it with my eyes closed. Intentionally put the "heat+5deg" at the bottom, so I can reach over, tap the power button to pull it out of hibernate, then push this button. Now to figure out how to remember to leave it on this screen before I go to bed.

Frankly, this to me is getting more to the point of an HA system. Up until now, i've pretty much had a "gee ma, looky here, i can control it through my computer" type setup. Controlling more than 1 device per screen, furthermore custom-creating screens and embedding custom logic in there is what this HA thing ought to be about.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_mbr_scenes.jpg

Well, given that:
1) The 2.0 PDA Viewer isn't done yet
2) The wife has a treo 650 with no dataplan and no ability to put the CQC DNV on it as it's a palm-OS

I decided to go ahead and use that webserver license I got as part of the "full CQC package" deal.

Yes Virginia, this is an ugly webpage. But, before spending excessive time coding it to be pretty (given that I don't know HTML), I opted to just do a raw dump of all the relevant HA type status info onto a webpage.

I can access this from the internet by going to http://ivbhouse.not-telling-you.net:12345/house_status.html from any PC or internet phone. That gets rerouted from my dyndns.com free hosting account to my house. I can't actually control anything over the 'net, that requires learning CML. I'm not willing to do that given the PDA Viewer will be out within a few weeks.

I won't post a screenshot here as it's 20" high, but you can see most of it on this page here (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/webserver/firstdraft.jpg)

Here's what the code looks like. Pretty dang simple. I won't show you the beginning security stuff, as i'm a paranoid guy, but here's some of the latter stuff. basically just put $(device.field) whereever you want the info to do. I used notepad to write the HTML, so i'm really no guru.



<big><b><u>Lighting Status:</b></u><br></big>
Entry: $(sample-zwave-ACT.Entry)<br>
InHouseEntry: $(sample-zwave-ACT.InHouseEntry)<br>
Living Room: $(sample-zwave-ACT.LivRm)<br>
Kitchen: $(sample-zwave-ACT.Kitchen)<br>
MBRCloset: $(sample-zwave-ACT.MBRCloset)<br>
DinRmPendant: $(sample-zwave-ACT.DinRmPendant)<br>
KBR: $(sample-zwave-ACT.KBR)<br>
Hallway: $(sample-zwave-ACT.Hallway)<br>
KBath: $(sample-zwave-ACT.KBath)<br>
DinRmSpot: $(sample-zwave-ACT.DinRmSpot)<br>
BRNook: $(sample-zwave-ACT.BRNook)<br>
<br>
<br>
<big><b><u>HVAC</b></u><br></big>
The Thermostat is: $(sample-aprilaire.T1Mode)<br>
Current Temperature in Dining room is: $(sample-aprilaire.T1CurTemp)<br>
The SetPoint is $(sample-aprilaire.T1SPHeat)<br>
<br>
Temperature in other parts of the house is:<br>
Outside: $(sample-elk.Probe15)<br>
MBR: $(sample-elk.Probe09)<br>
Attic: $(sample-elk.Probe10)<br>
Inside Entry: $(sample-elk.Keypad02)<br>
Media Closet: $(sample-elk.Keypad01)<br>

<br>
<big><b><u>Audio Status:</b></u><br></big>
FamilyRoom Xantech is: $(sample-xantech.Z1Power)<br>
FamilyRoom Denon is: $(sample-denon-3805.MZPower)<br>
BRN/Kitchen/KBath is: $(sample-xantech.Z2Power)<br>
Livrm/DinRm is: $(sample-xantech.Z3Power)<br>
KBR is: $(sample-xantech.Z5Power)<br>
MBR is: $(sample-xantech.Z6Power)<br>
<br>
<br>
</body></html>

IVB... How is it you get more work done on your vacation than I have done on my whole system?

BTW, you left the kitchen light on... :)

Chris

Haven't left yet. I got that done after putting kids to bed (@8:30pm) and midnight, while also helping wife with Excel, dealing with work emails, chatting on CQCUsers.com, and watching DaveMathewsBand:CentralPark Disc1.

I am either incredibly smart and the king of multitasking, or you're overestimating how difficult this stuff actually is. Trust me, in a few weeks, once you "get" CQC and how it works, you'll be slamming things out of the park too.

Well, i've gone from a "yeah, that webserver thing is cute, not really that necessary" to "I must use that and use it more" in a matter of 1 week, and the wife in a matter of 1 hr. Much more so for the value of PDA control.

We're on vacation now, and I've been using the above page to keep tabs on the house and housesitter. Wife thinks it's very nice to be able to monitor said things, esp given how crime has been on the rise given the holiday season.

Well, we just got a call from NextAlarm saying that the alarm was tripped, they tried contacting the premises, no one picked up, so they dispatched the police. I happened to be on a work call in the hotel room at the time (don't they know i'm on vacation), so I quickly hung up, pulled up the CCTV's on the PDA. Didn't see anything, decided to pull up CQC. Regardless of the 2.0 CQC DotNetViewer not yet being released, I can't actually put CQC on my work laptop. But I could quickly pull up that page, boy does it load fast.

I scanned through the security system, checked out the doors and interior with the CCTV. All looked fine. But that's still not all - I just got HUGE mileage out of the 10 motion sensors and that "recent activity" logic I coded in ElkRP where it'll tell CQC if there's been any motion in any room in the last <x> minutes. Scanned through it, realized there was only one zone reporting recent activity, pulled that up on the CCTV, realized it was fine, must have been some funky false alarm. I'll check out the ElkRP log when I get back to make sure the Elk threw a false alarm, and it wasn't a communications or NextAlarm problem. Apparently there was an earthquake a few hours ago, so that may have thrown some wiring or other electronics akilter.

Anyhow, count the wife (& me) in as one of the "webserver rocks" converted, she actually had me add the bookmark for the above page in her Treo 650P. Both of us were already "PDA access is key" folks, now much more so (although admittedly, today's activity was all about the CCTV PDA access).

She cannot put CQC on her PalmOS PDA, nor the CCTV PDA software. Hence, she's stuck with webserver access. However, she's now contemplating getting the same phone as me so she can pull up the CCTV if I'm unavailable. Hmmm, maybe i'll get the new Cingular 8525 and she can have my 5 month old 8125.

We wouldn't have been able to actually do anything had we verified the existence of the bad guys. Honestly, I would have deferred that to the cops anyhow - this just gave us peace of mind that the house is actually fine within the matter of a few minutes, as opposed to the 1-3 hours it would have taken for a relative or the house sitter to finally make it there. (oh, plus avoiding the $250 charge for a false alarm if we weren't able to succesfully cancel). That is priceless.

If you're going to be a big man and use a software based controller for primary automation duties, I've got 2 words for you: Battery Backup.

A few hours after the prior post, there was a power outage in my house. Unfortunately, I didn't have a battery backup and the machines require someone to press the button in order to turn on. I haven't been able to access my house servers for >1wk now since I wasn't home. We just got home and checked, sure enough, both the HA server and the CCTV server were off.

I'll be buying 2 battery backup UPS's tomorrow to correct that defiency...

IVB,

UPS is the only way to go for that kind of computer hardware!

I have my HA/DVR computers as well as my DVD unRaid servers on 1KW APC UPSs since SCE here in Los Angeles is very flaky.

Costco has 1KW UPSs for around $100 all the time.

Regards,
TCIII

the machines require someone to press the button in order to turn on.
Check your BIOS and set the power failure scheme to "ON" after power loss. Or worded something along those lines. Use that feature along with a UPS incase of extended outages and the battery goes belly up :)

Turns out CompUSA has 900VA Belkin UPS's on sale today, 40% off, for $70. They had an 110VA for $77, but were sold out. I picked up 2 of them, one for each PC.

Also thx on that BIOS setting tip - I happened to be re-installing XP on a PC that my wife managed to completely hose, and I took care of that. Not sure my 3.5yr old Asus mobo that I use on the servers has that, but i'll def check.

THomas - are you referring to the TrippLite ones Costco has for $99? They have the little screen on front showing input voltage. Don't recall if these were UPSs or merely power conditioners, but was thinking of one for my AV equipment. Any comments? (sorry to hijack).

Also, IVB, can you tell me what SW you're using for your cameras? I'm not too satisfied with the KGuard SW that came with my DVR card.

shawnharper,

The TrippLite units at Costco with the little screens are definitely 1kw UPSs and they also have line voltage regulation built in when they are not in the UPS mode.

I bought one about a year ago and it is still working fine with my DVR PC.

It is not pure sine wave so it will not work well with HiFi equipment that uses a linear power supply instead of a switcher.

If you need pure sine wave, then you will have to consider the Belkin unit ($389) or a TrippLite/APC pure sine wave model.

Regards,
TCIII

Also, IVB, can you tell me what SW you're using for your cameras? I'm not too satisfied with the KGuard SW that came with my DVR card.

I'm using the Diginet software that's meant for Kodicom cards & systems. The software is simply "ok" - got all the features/functionality, but it takes over the PC and won't let you do anything else with it. Frankly, given that it's meant for a dedicated kodicomm system, and that this is a grey market thing, I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to sacrifice a PC. I'm actually contemplating selling it off and getting a GeoVision. I think there's a few cocoon'ers who have it, you could ask there for their opinions.

Did someone ask in another thread how much time I spend on this HA stuff?

I'm declaring a moratorium on me buying stuff for a bit. A ton of UPS stuff has begun arriving, refilling the parts closet that I was close to emptying. I've now got, or within a week will have the following unfinished stuff. I just estimated how many manhours it will take me to do the physical install (ie, nothing to do with CQC, just the physical install). I won't put the # here, let's just say that there's a distinct possibility it's not going to be 2 digits. It might be, all based on how easily I can run the wires, but it could easily not be.

And, that doesn't include getting CQC to work with all this stuff. Fortunately, that should be <15% of the overall time estimate.

At my previously stated estimate of an avg of 1hr/day, 1 weekend per month@5 hours, I wouldn't be shocked if it takes 4-6 months to "finish" mounting what I currently own. Then again, doing all this would give me multi-thermo HVAC, 10 rooms of audio, 2 rooms of video, every single light switch being automated (all 25 of them), callerid, 60 sensors to protect a 1650sqft house, complete CCTV coverage. That's not too shabby.

Currently in the parts closet (ie, doesn't include what i've already mounted, which is probably 3x more than this list).
Lighting:
- 12 zWave switches

HVAC
Aprilaire distro panel and 2nd 8870, and 1 8051 temp sensor

Audio
- 3 rooms of speakers (2 stereo input speakers and 1 regular pair) and amps to power them (1 4ch Sherbourn amp; 1 parasound zamp)
- 7 Niles inwall volume controllers

Video
- Autopatch 4YDM;
- 2nd DirecTV receiver (this has been in there for 2 yrs now);
- Sony XL1B CD/DVD megachanger

Security/HA
- 3 speakers and the Elk-800 to power them;
- 2 motion sensors;
- 2 waterbug sensors;
- proximity reader;
- 15 door/window sensors.
- 2 motion detectors,
- 4 glassbreak detectors,
- CCTV camera

Telephone
- CallerID PC modem

Misc
- 32port patch panel,

Oh, and did I mention that i pulled all 300 CDs down from the attic to re-rip in lossless format?

Wife was getting happy that the closet was getting almost empty. Ha, guess I showed her!

The bitter cold arctic winds this am prompted me to do something cool that anyone with CQC and Windows XP on their server (at least the one hooked up to the stereo) can do: Announce the current temperature, forecast, and high for the day at 8am every am.

It was pretty darn easy. I've avoided using my audio equipment for HA announcements given the 1-2s delay in turning on, switching sources, etc, but given that we don't use any of it then, and that this is a timed event, that's not a problem. I set it up so that:
1) System wakes up at 8am
2) Turns on master bedroom zone
3) sets input & volume
4) Waits 2s
5) Begins series of announcements
6) Waits 3s
7) Repeats, just in case we didn't catch it.

Here's the gory details of the "coding". All point&click, except obviously the "good morning/etc" bit.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/announce_weather.JPG

Well, I received the 2nd Aprilaire 8870 and the Distro panel yesterday, learned a few lessons.

Lesson learned #767: Read the manual. Then read it again. Or else you might do what I did, and remove the HVAC wiring from one thermo, re-run to the distro panel, and then realize the panel is basically an RS-485 hub, and the HVAC wiring is *supposed* to go to the thermo that you just yanked it from.

Lesson Learned #768: If you're mucking with your HVAC, the installation/service/wiring manual for your furnace is a *good* thing to have.

Lesson Learned #769: If you're mucking with your HVAC, don't forget to turn off your furnace, or else you could accidentally short 2 wires and blow a $0.99 fuse and not realize it until 5 hours into the troubleshooting.

I haven't actually replaced the fuse yet, but I realized 30mins ago that the light in the furnace was flashing green 4x, yellow 2x. I read through the whole install/service manual, found the location with status codes, realized it said "Fuse open, short in the 24VAC wiring". Suddenly remembered that temporary spark I saw when I was re-running the HVAC wiring.

God I hope that electrical access panel is easy to access - it would SUCK to have to pay a $105 minimum repairman fee just to replace a fuse that the manual says is a "standard 3A automative fuse". Plus having no heat and waking up tomorrow to a dining room that's 56 degrees (again).

WooHoo! It works. Again, thank god I kept that furnace manual - it pointed me right to the fuse, and which screws to undo to get to it. Shockingly simple to do, VERY standard automotive fuse. Popped it in, and we got heat!

Still not working through CQC, not sure if I messed up the communication wiring, but at least the wife is off my back. Plus I need to learn how to use multiple thermo's.

All in, I feel quite good that even though I took 8 hours to do 2 hours of work due to a screwup on my part, I learned how to fix it and didn't just give up and call a repairman. (was very close I have to admit).

Very little got done over the past 2 days, HA or family time or otherwise because I upgraded from my currently Earthlink DSL to EarthlinkDSL+Voice. Long story short, I had no DSL for 2 days, and my wife&I now realize how crippling that is for our lifestyle.

But, the 2.0 Dot Net Viewer did go into Beta on Monday, so I pulled up all my screens and they work generally fine. There's 1-2 bugs with rendering images that I've found, but then again, it is in beta...

First thing I did was to create a lighting screen, as it seems my wife is constantly asking me to turn off lights after I armed the security system to leave. Now it's pretty simple to use a GUI to turn this stuff on/off. I also added a "recent motion" vs "current motion" screen for security purposes.

I'm going to implement some form of "combo tasks" menu, yes i know that's a horrid name, to do stuff like "I'm coming home and it's dark&cold. Crank the heat and turn on the lights so my wife&kids don't scream bloody murder".

I just realized these screenshots look choppy - i'll put some stuff I haven't changed in here so you see that it's me accidentally saving the screenshots as too low resolution, not the CQC Stuff.

At this point, the primary thing I do with my cellphone is:
- Lights
- Heat
- Security
- CCTV

For the non-CQC savvy folks: these use CQC's DotNetViewer which directly hits the CQC XML Gateway server in my house, so I don't need logmein.com, and so no unnecessary software or security holes.

Here's the full list of screenshots if you want to see all the A/V control stuff. (http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum/showthread.php?t=2005) Pretty boring - I just resized my fullsize template to 240x320 and changed images to lighter weight so they download quickly off my slow-a$$ cingular connection.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Home.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Elk.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion_Recent.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion_Current.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_HVAC.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Lights.JPG

So much stuff I need a list of what i'll tell you:

1) Learned how to use events & variables to do a single screen for recent/current motion
2) Automated apple.com HD movie trailers in CQC!!
3) Two mistakes in speaker mounting may have cost me $250.
4) Looks like i'll need one zone per room after all, for a total of 10zones.

1 & 2) Events/Variables & apple.com trailers
How cool is the CQC user community? Well, in the last 3 days one person (acheslow) showed me how to do something with variables &events so I can use a single screen for recent & current motion, and another user (jonathan) wrote a driver that will automatically download the HD movie trailers from apple.com during low internet connection usage. Check this out, how cool is this stuff!

There's also some text below about some, eh, accidents today, but in general a large step forward.

First, a single screen with current & recent motion. I did it for the PPC without using states, just variables & events. I've now got 47 different events in CQC, but i'm also using perfmon to log performance to make sure there's no issues.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/PPC_Motion.jpg

And now, the COOL stuff: Automated movie trailer download. Even the wife thinks this is cool. It's only got 10 of the 92 downloaded so far, given each is 50-200MB, and there's 92, it may take a while. But, it can sort in download order (haven't tried that yet), so I can see the most recently downloaded ones first.

I'm still playing with the fonts to see what looks best.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/overlay_hdtrailers.jpg


http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup_hdtrailer_info.jpg

3: Mistakes costing me $$
But alas, it wasn't all love&roses. I proved twice that I'm a DIY'er, meaning I don't do this for a living constantly. I went to mount a speaker in the Master Bath, haven't done that in MONTHS so I forgot to check for a joist. Well, I cut out the hole, promptly beat myself, then put the sheetrock circle back up & mudded it.

But that's not all. When I cut the correct hole and went to mount the speaker, the screwdriver slipped and I poked a hole in the speaker. Fortunately I had another one for the Den, so I used that. I'll see if this one works, since the wiring/etc is the hard part. It's easy to replace a speaker once all that is done.

Even if I "threw away" $150 on that speaker (stereo input, so it's $$) and have to call in a sheetrock guy to fix my hole mistake, I figure I'm still getting functionality that I could not have possibly afforded to pay for.

4: 1 zone per room
Retrofitting is hard stuff. In 3 different rooms now I've noticed that I cannot mount an in-wall volume controller easily as there's fireblock studs in the way. Rather than tear up my walls, i'm just homerunning the speaker cable back to the media closet and will use the EXP9 with the ZPR68 to control the volume. Thank god I got both of those, otherwise i'd have holes galore from having to drill through those and dealing with the damn code issues that'd generate.

Phew, what a lot of progress!!

I would say that 1 room per zone is going to be the best solution going forward. It is certainly more expensive to set up, but since you already had the equipment, price isn't an issue anyway. It will certainly give you more flexibility in the future.

I personally think I've decided on using a switcher and amplifiers to build out my whole house a/v system. I'll use CQC to control it all. That just seems to be more flexible and prehaps even cheaper than buying a "ready made" system like Xantech, Russound, Nuvo, etc. I could potentially end up with 15 audio zones and up to 9 video zones, so there is no ready made system that meets my needs.

Well, i've redone my screens in 3 ways for a variety of reasons.
1) Add a CCTV shot to the wrapper (less stable screens, but addresses one of wife's major issues)
2) Switch to a floorplan view as the default and eliminate a/v control on wrapper
3) Eliminate all menu screens, just the one menu popup.

I actually did this 5 days ago, but wanted to wait before posting to see how it would work out.

So on to the details:
1) CCTV on wrapper: this change that will make them slightly less stable, but potentially much more functional. One of my wife's biggest complaints was that it took too long to pull up the CCTV on the touchpanel, hence greatly diminishing the value of a front-door camera. I redid my screens to put a small web browser right on the wrapper, and pointed it at the CCTV. Unfortunately, it looks like that CCTV app does something funky graphic-wise and interferes with SageTV/TheaterTek/other apps, so I cannot use this on my regular PCs. But, for the touchpanel, this has been working out just fine.
The instability is that whenever there's any hint of a network issue or slowness, the diginet PDA app will lose the connection temporarily and throw a popup. A few times when we've tapped the touchpanel after not using it for a while, we'll see 10-15 popup error messages from it. No big deal, we just keep hitting the "ok" button with our finger until they're all dismissed.

I can only put one shot on the screen at any one time - the user can either use the scroll bars to navigate (we never do) or hit the button to switch out the overlay to one where all the cameras are shown.

So far, the wife likes the rapid viewing of the CCTV more than the irritation of those popups, but obviously she gets irritated at having to press that "ok" button 10-15x. I'll let this sit a while longer to see how it goes.

2) Use a floorplan default view where both lights & a/v is visible, with just the volume control on a popup. Still tinkering with this bit, screens are clearly denser content, so far everyone has picked up quickly after the initial shock and 60 seconds of staring at it to figure out what the hell the screen means. But, so far it's looking like after those first few mins, people like having all the buttons on the screen so that they can immediately do that which they most commonly do.

3) Eliminated all menus. yes, i know the screenshot below is ugly, but before spending too much time on the aesthetics I wanted to see if this would actually be usable. So far it's working out well, but it's one of those "i need to let it sit for a few weeks and burn in" before I can really ask the wife what she prefers.

Here's the screenshots:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/wrapper_touch.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/VS20/popup_menu.jpg

In the "totally outside CQC control" camp, I just got my MediaMVP working with SageV6 for a simple 2nd video zone. Works fine, I opted to run a hardwire as it was easy to run even though I bought the wireless unit. (only took me 3 hours and 1-2dozen mistakes to make a dang 15' RJ45 cable)

I can confirm that it works fine to playback DVDs if you navigate to each VOB file; i'm now looking into how SageTV does playback and the cover-art browsing therein. I had this working 12+months back when I was messing around with it, haven't looked at it since then.

I can also confirm that I forgot how crappy SD PQ is; I was watching a DVD, and it was nearly painful compared to watching it on the plasma. It's not really for me though - this is more for the kids, also so the wife can watch her god awful reality shows and chick flicks and let me have the plasma.

One more bit of equipment out of the parts closet and into "production". Gotta like that.

This is cool - I just setup automated data logging of my Elk temperature sensors and my callerid history into an ODBC database using the DatalogDB driver that jscheller wrote for CQC. I used SQLServerExpress (free version) as I was having issues getting the ODBC driver for MySQL to work.

I'm logging each of these fields every 30 seconds, but there's a flag on the driver schedule table to indicate whether you want to always write it or only write if there's a change.

For stuff like the temperature, you'd want to always record it so you could create a graph to see how it moves over time. I'll record the temperature in various areas of the house, compared to the temperature my aprilaire is set at, and plot them on the same graph so I can see how efficient the air flow is.

In a (to me) much more clear value add, i'll have the name, number, & time of every phone call into my house recorded into a database but *only* if it's changed from the prior poll (ie, don't record every dang 30 seconds, only if there's a new record). This is something that bit me 3 weeks ago as my college buddy called, I accidentally deleted the message. I had the wrong email and # for him, and no one I knew had his # as he had just moved and was unlisted. No joke, I sent him a physical letter telling him to call me again, as I knew that would get to him (eventually).

No coding needed for this. I told the driver what fields to log by simply adding some rows to a table as such:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/datalogdb-schedule.JPG

That results in a table with the following values:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/datalogdb-values.JPG

Very cool. Do you plan on adding zones to your HVAC if the data ends up showing that there are some inefficiencies in your system?

Unfortunately, this is yet another prime example of how I'm really just a DIY'er who doesn't really know much, and is growing his system organically. (read: i am so lost it's not funny, and i'm really just guessing)

It's hard to say what the specific next steps will be until I actually see the data. That said, it's going to be some serious $$ to add zone capability to a single-furnace system, so the very first reaction I'd have is to add/move/expand/shrink heat registers to better control the air flow. I have a feeling the data will show 15+ degree differences in the temperature between rooms because the prior owners put in a totally massive heat register in the kids bathroom, but only one tiny one in the LR/DR. It's only $500 to add a new heat register, but before rushing off and doing that I want to learn a little more about what's needed & where, and how the science of airflow works so I can work with the HVAC installer to redesign the system properly.

Forgive me forum, for I have sinned. It has been over a month since my last entry. I was getting a little fried on HA after 16 months, so i needed some time off. One exciting thing happened tonight, thought I'd share:

The power of all free drivers has struck again. I scored a Concerto with 2 keypads and a host of accessories off eBay for $530 shipped! I've already got a buyer for the ZPR68 who doesn't mind the source bleeding problem i'm having, I'll be selling off the EXP9 with 5 zone cards, and probably all 3 parasound zamps within the next 7 days. The concerto is a pretty nice unit for that price point - the EXP9 w/5 cards cost me $450, and the zamps were $125 each. Granted I'll only be able to do 8 zones, but I might get the extender if I can find someone still selling it. If I can get my cost back on that stuff, I'll be happy. I was pretty tempted to get the grand concerto, but it was obviously much much more than $500 and I just couldn't justify that.

Well, off to create screens that reference the concerto, and to find boxes for all the spare stuff I now own and need to sell!

Way to score a bargain, IVB. Five hundred for a Concerto? Sweet. I have to watch Ebay a lot closer. Isn't the main diff between that and the Grand the fancy OLED keypads? Which don't give as much information as your 3400, anyway ....

On a previous post, you mentioned temp monitoring w/ the Elk. Is there a limitation on how many temp probes you can use with it? Ideally, I'd like to monitor six different zones for temp. If the Elk can do that, I won't need to do the Sensatronics thing.

I'm off to check Ebay for prices .... :)

On a previous post, you mentioned temp monitoring w/ the Elk. Is there a limitation on how many temp probes you can use with it? Ideally, I'd like to monitor six different zones for temp. If the Elk can do that, I won't need to do the Sensatronics thing.


Zones 1->16 are for smokes & temp sensors so 16 total there. However, check out the look&feel of the Elk sensors - they are BUTT ugly. I have one in a psuedo-visible place, 2 more in not too visible places. I'm hoping to debug my flushmount aprilaire sensors which look cleaner. I'm having a wiring issue though, haven't spent much time debugging it.

Damn, that concerto is hassling me about maintaining an RS232 connection. It works fine through the keypads though, here's hoping I don't have to sell it and pay the $1300 or so for a new one.

Any updates on the progress w/your Concerto integration? I think the Nuvo stuff looks pretty sweet and wondered what your thoughts were on everything.

Actually on second thought, could you give me some ideas as to what you're even using something like the Concerto for? I started making a list of everything I would want to distribute and it looked to me like almost all of it would be or could be coming from an HTPC.

I mean the Concerto can take like 6 source inputs or something and I'm just wondering what in the world I would even hook up to something like that. The system, especially the Grand Concerto, LOOKS great and I'm sure it would be awesome for people that don't plan to have all of their media on a PC but from your other posts and your website it seems like most of your stuff is on a PC like I plan to have mine. At that point, besides distributing audio from the PC, what would you use the other 5 inputs for?

I guess things like regular radio and XM radio but I'm not even sure those would serve much purpose for me and can't you get those onto your PC anyways? Basically it seems like the PC could just do the audio distribution itself assuming enough sound cards/outputs which makes me wonder what the Concerto (or Russound or whatever) would be doing besides amplification. I think I'm confused! :-(

oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. Got so caught up in redoing some stuff and prepping for the webinar (up to 30 people pre-registered) I forgot to post another entry.

The issue with the nuvo was simply that it wasn't configured correctly with the Concerto Configurator software. As soon as I did that, it started working perfectly.

I ended up scoring a few more cheap keypads off eBay, so all-in-all, this is proving to be a very worthwhile move.

Ok, made some important realizations lately.

1) On occasion, eBay really rocks. That concerto is working awesome, and i've now put up several keypads. More on that in the next point.

2) I was wrong. In 2nd tier rooms, equipment keypads rather than passive volume controls are actually a great idea because you can turn on a zone. I'm finding that inevitably, we listen to the same dang XM station 80% of the time. For background music, it's much easier to quickly turn on a zone and we find ourselves actually using the WHA more as a result. I put 4 up (MBR, MBath, KBath, Breakfast Nook) and they rock.

3) I've relearned that not putting at least some governors on a machine is just a bad idea. I have a machine that my wife has put tons of internet crap on. It has begun crashing massively, worst of all, twice during the webinar. I never use it for HA nor CQC, but it happened to be the only machine that I could get a microphone to work on last Friday. I'll reformat it, then put the lockdowns on. It's silly to own a machine that I can't use applications reliably on.

4) I've already got something like 65 events, but it looks like I'll need more. The plan is working, the wife has begun getting addicted to automated lighting. She now wants the entry lights to automatically come on at sunset if the security is in ArmedAway mode. I'm hoping several more months of this will get her used to it, and i'll get less pushback about putting in a hardwired Homeworks solution. When I casually brought that up 1 month ago to her, I was royally shot down and laughed out of the room.

5) I've decided to get my 5 year old her own PC. I'm going to use CQC to create a custom fullscreen page where she can only start the games that I let her (dora, etc), or play music in the "approved" genre. I'll use the CQC media repo to put songs or playlists in there. That'll be the first time I do truly "independent" systems both being run by CQC.

I just had a cool idea tonight for merging a variety of the drivers to add WAF in a way that actually helps.

We use SageTV for DVR, and many times we turn the plasma off with the Sage UI up and manually turn off the receiver. This means that when we turn the plasma back on and decide to start playing something, we have to minimize Sage, turn on the receiver, then maximize Sage. Of course, this will hopefully be gone as soon as the Sage driver is enhanced, but until then I've added the following triggered event:

- When SageTV begins playing a show (detectable via the IP driver), check to see if the denon is on and set to the right source, right volume, etc. If not, then set it to be. That way we don't to worry about anything, CQC will take care of it.

Daddy just built a (slow and old but they won't know) computer for the kids, installed some new games for them, and built them their own CQC screen! Obviously very work-in-progress, but i've been at it for 9 hours now (including 3 runs to compusa because the dang scavenging didn't work out quite like planned)...


Look what they're going to see when they wake up. It all works too. (the notepad is because my 5yr old has taken to writing long rambling stories, and we're seriously running out of paper...)

I'm automatically booting the PC into fullscreen CQC mode, even though it's a locked down PC. The games are starting over the CQC screen, so when they exit, CQC is back. Not easy to get to the desktop (unless they know to press that button on the top right, and i'm not telling). That way there's as little temptation as possible.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/kids/wrapper_kids.jpg

Not easy to get to the desktop (unless they know to press that button on the top right, and i'm not telling). That way there's as little temptation as possible.
Nice, but don't think for a minute that the curiousity of a child won't see what it does. :D

Can you make the button the same color as the background so you have to look for it? :)

Can you make the button the same color as the background so you have to look for it? :)
Man, that's brilliant. That's exactly what i'm going to do.

So, the kids were certainly excited this am. My wife warned me that they would fight over it, but my approach is that rather than get them 2 of everything, I intentionally get them 2 different things and force them to share. I also kicked them off after they started fighting over it 20mins in, and told them they could come back "when you're holding hands and talking nicely to each other, like sisters are supposed to".

Here's a picture of the physical install. There's not nearly enough pink to suit them, they want to get a pink mousepad, and I promised them i'd spray paint the monitor frame pink after 30 days, once the dust had settled. (no, not joking!). You'll note that I got a 15" LCD with VESA mounting. I picked up a $35 articulating arm mount off eBay, it's pretty decent. moves every which way. They can push it back when not in use.

I accept that they might break the LCD, but they're both girlie girls, so the odds are low. Plus, I need to stop shielding them and let them make their own mistakes, although that's certainly a hard thing for a father of 2 girls to do :)

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/kidspc.jpg

There's not nearly enough pink to suit them
My 7 year old would go nuts over that keyboard, so I'm not showing it to her. ;)

Of course her bedroom is painted from the Disney Princess Collection at Home Depot, so she is also kind of into pink.

But I don't think I could get her to give up her cordless mouse for that one.

Oy! You were saying herdfan?

My daughter was using her new PC, directly behind me, when she said completely without prompting: "Daddy, when are you going to let me play CDs by myself"? No joke. I hadn't mentioned it to her before, total freak coincidence. (although I did say to myself - "atta girl"). I happened to be working on a filtered CD screen for her, so I said "how about in an hour". She saw the vladstudio.com art, and said that it was nice. I asked her if she liked it, and she wanted to see the others.

VladStudio.com has 45ish pieces in his "The Two" collection, which is typically what I stick with. Of course, look at the one she picked out. On the upside, after I finished it, she looked at the whole screen, and it made sense to her. ("atta girl")

The way it works is that:
1) Pressing a zone button will turn on that zone and automatically set the input to CD. (That way XM can't be played by her)
2) The Louder/Quieter buttons have if-then logic behind it, and any of those 3 zones currently on will be adjusted by one decibel.
3) Pressing the "Games" button takes you back to the prior screen.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/kids/overlay_cd1_kids.jpg

Pressing a zone button will turn on that zone and automatically set the input to CD. (That way XM can't be played by her)
WOW! That's a lot of pink.

And I understand not wanting young girls to not have access to XM, but have you though about allowing them access to XM 115 (?) which is the kids channels and is harmelss. Maybe a single button to access only that channel. I would stay away from Radio Disney as it seems geared to the 10-12 year old set.

But when we had XM (Sirius now), my daughter loved the kids channel.

BTW, that other thing we discussed via PM is progressing nicely and the wireless aspect seems rock solid.

Man, this Elk panel combined with CQC is really a pretty powerful combo, and it's beauty is it's simplicity.

I'm working from home today as I had to drop the car off at the mechanic. The wife has been spending tons of time on the patio almost every day lately as the weather has been pretty nice. But half the time when she's out there, she forgets to turn on the patio speakers, or decide later to turn on the speakers. This means schlepping inside the house.

I just spent <1hour (my god it's true, some things are easy):
1) taking one of the 40 year old light switches I pulled out when I put my zWave switches in,
2) mounting a single gang box in a hidden and protected location (just under the stairs under the awning - very easy to get to),
3) fishing wire to the Elk panel, and hooking it up to a zone. After setting it up as a non-alarm zone in the Elk, I
4) setup a trigger in CQC. If the light is switched, it toggles the power state of the patio zone for the concerto. If it's currently off, it turns it on, sets it to XM, station #20, volume of -21.

Sure, it's not earth shattering nor is it rocket science, but I got an "oh, that's cool" from the wife. Plus it was cheap, an incremental cost of $1.50 for the single gang box. I got boatloads of wire, plus the switch and faceplate are old and look awful. But given that you cannot physically see it unless you look under the stairs, it's good enough.

Every little thing helps for the overall WAF, esp cheap stuff like this.

Well it's official. I've sold my Kodicomm DVR card, and today I ordered the AverMedia NV5000 plus 4channel extender from CollinR over at LowVoltageSolutions. He's a professional CCTV guy over on cocoon who's clearly forgotten more about CCTV's than I'll ever know. After discussing my needs with him, it seemed that the NV5000 was the appropriate card for my needs.

It cost me a bit more than the grey-market Kodicom, but given that it's: 1) legit, and 2)recommended by a pro, i'm feeling pretty good about it.

He's got some real interesting recommendations on using the looping capability to feed the stream into SageTV, and we'll research the ability to use any SageClient (ie MediaMVP) to display the camera stream.

I've also begun ordering the pieces to rebuild my CCTV server using a full intel northbridge/southbridge PC. I'm holding off on the CPU until 4/22 as that's when Intel is supposed to cut prices on the Core2Duo line. I'll use the one PC for SageTV Server & CCTV Server duties, and put an E6400 in it so I can do HD transcoding on-the-fly for my MediaMVP. When the HD extender comes out, that won't be needed, but given that I have another C2D in the house, I figure I should standardize on it.

Sorry about this coming late, I recently discovered this site. I read in a post way back that your power went off and you were on vacation and was unable to turn your pc back on. You can use your HA panel to turn your computer on remotely. i just spliced onto the wires from the power button on my pc, put a headphone jack on the back panel, then ran that into an open contact on my HAI panel. I made a button I can use with snaplink, or call with my cellphone that toggles for 2 seconds, so i can turn my server on or off remotely. Its simple, costs about $3 to do. Ive had 2 pcs controlled like that for over a year now and it works flawlessly.

Yeah, I was contemplating doing that to create a dead mans switch. I found the BIOS setting to turn back on if power loss, so it's been mitigated away.

BTW, how exactly does your cellphone linkage work? Is it one of those "call your house and press this keycode" type thing? I think that's how the Elk works, but i'm not really sure - haven't tried it.

yeah either call my house an press a button, or snaplink over the web. im going to add a 12v relay inside the case soon to send a contact closure to my HA board so i can monitor status also. Ive been looking around at software to tie everything together, i see youre a fan of cqc. whats the learning curve for someone who has no programming knowledge?

Ive been looking around at software to tie everything together, i see youre a fan of cqc. whats the learning curve for someone who has no programming knowledge?

No programming knowledge needed to do everything that I've done. If you can attend one of the monthly webinars or user group meetings and watch the tutorial videos, you can get up to speed relatively quickly. I can't give a manhour estimate as some folks "get it" within a few hours, some folks have a harder time.

FWIW, the full license of CQC is on sale until 4/13 for $625 full license, normally $895. You'd save big bucks if you can evaluate it within the next 5 days. That's obviously way too fast to really evaluate it, you'd barely get under the covers by then, but thought you should know.

timing is everything i guess... right now i have family in from out of town, and too busy with work to do much in the next few weeks, id love to try it out. I downloaded girder about a year ago, and didnt have enough time to get more than controlling my music with my pda done before the trial ran out. Ill try to start checking out your webinars and hopefuly one day take the big plunge, if it goes on sale again.

I started out my day off attempting to swap out some switches for zWave, only to find that the electrician who wired up this house had a sense of humor again. I have never seen such screwed up wiring. It just doesn't make logical sense. After 45 minutes, I admitted defeat, and told my wife I'd have to call in a licensed electrician for the 6 remaining zWave switches that need to be installed.

Then, I spent most of the rest of the day testing/rewiring one of my unpowered Concerto zones, and had issues every way I turned. No matter what I did, there was no sound. First I thought the equipment wasn't working, then it was my wiring, then back to the equipment. I swapped damn well near everything out. Turns out I had TWO bad mini->RCA cables. But that's still not all - Sherbourn decided to make the 12V trigger and signal sensing only work with their "input B", which is supposed to be an override type input for paging/etc. Of course, it says that in the manual AND on the back of the amp, but god forbid I do that. I didn't even think to read the fine print as I figured it'd be a standard setup. I want those 4 hours of my life back.

So after needing to take 5 hours just to get one thing done, I went somewhere I knew I'd have luck: Interface Editing. I've been using the PPC/DotNetViewer a little more lately, not for any real reason. I decided that while the menus were fine for the wife, there's no need for me to navigate around so much. I came up with an "expert" screen which will be my initial screen, the wife rarely uses it so it's cool.

Here it is. You'll notice I jammed everything on the one screen, and generally lined up the lights on/off button with the motion indicator for that room. I also put in the outside & inside temps. I've got more temp sensors than that, but I really don't care about any more than just one room.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/ppc_overview.jpg

Gadzooks, forgot the callerid portion - checking on who called from the road was a big question I got from the wife. Boy I'd love to know if we had any messages, but that's another level of integration that i'm not willing to do now.

Updated screenshot above.

Well, I won the zWaveWorld rockstar contest. I had to write up a story for publication, figured i'd share with you guys too.

Not sure how much this will be hacked during publication or edited to make it flow smoother, i guess we'll find out next week.

---------------
My name is IVB, and I’ve got a pretty robust home automation setup using Intermatic zWave products to control my lighting. I’ve fully integrated it with the rest of my setup, so I can control my lights both manually through the use of various devices, as well as in an automated sense through my home automation software package (CQC) and my Elk security system that controls the rest of my house.

For my story, I’ll start with the outside of the house and walk you through it. In California, the concept of “mudrooms” is common. A mudroom is a location just inside an outer front door where you come in and remove your shoes, then unlock your actual front door and enter the house. The downside is that if it’s night time, you either have to waste electricity and leave the lights on until you come home, or install one of those huge motion sensor lights. In addition, it’s the perfect place for someone to come in and break into your house. Not in my house! If the Elk detects motion in that room, it tells CQC, and CQC will tell the Intermatic zWave USB controller to turn on the light. (see http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/mudroom.jpg ). This extra light also helps the covert security camera inside the motion sensor that I’ve got in there record what’s going on. Don’t worry – the light won’t stay on if no one is in there. After a minute of no motion, CQC will automatically tell the Intermatic stick to turn off the entry light.

Now that you’re inside the house, you may want to turn off the light instantly. Or, perhaps, you know someone is about to come in the house and you want to turn it on. Well, my house is old, and I don’t have any convenient locations where there’s wiring for a zWave inwall keypad. That’s fine, given my home automation setup I can turn the light on & off using my security system’s keypad! Using the same concept as above, pressing a button on my Elk security system tells CQC to have the Intermatic stick toggle the light. (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/elk_keypad.jpg)

The first thing you do is sit down at the desk and check your email. You’ve got a floor lamp, but you keep forgetting to turn it off at night. Rather than use the lamp’s on/off switch directly, you plug it into a zWave appliance switch. Now, all you have to do is press the pushbutton mounted under the desk, and it’ll have the Elk tell CQC to turn on that zWave light. (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/desk_button.jpg)

As you walk inside the house, you’ll quickly get to the kitchen. There, you may want to turn on/off other lights, perhaps the whole house audio system, and maybe arm the magnetic lock that I have on the outer front door. Walking up to the Fujtisu tablet pc in the kitchen (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/kitchen_panel.JPG - only $160 on eBay) shows you the default CQC screen where you can get an overview of the house status and turn lights on/off at will. (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/wrapper_touch.jpg ).

Well, it might be a little chilly out, or perhaps you just want to change. If you go into the bedroom and open up the closet door, the door sensor in the floor tells the Elk panel to have CQC turn on the zWave light in the closet. Once you close the door, the door sensor has the Elk tell CQC to turn off that light. Have a tendency to walk away from the closet and forget the light on? No worries, CQC will turn off the zWave light automatically after 15 minutes.

By now you’re probably tired, and want to plop down on the bed and relax. After watching some TV you’re probably ready to go to bed. But, your significant other (or you) may have forgotten to turn off all the various stereos, lights, turn down the heat, or arm the security system. You’re probably too tired to walk downstairs or around the house and do that. Not to worry, home automation to the rescue! Simply take the wifi Fujitsu tablet on the nightstand out of it’s dock (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/mbr_panel.jpg) , and select whatever you want to adjust from the CQC UI. (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/wrapper_mbrpanel.jpg) Sure, it might look a little intimidating at first glance, but if you stop to look it over it’s quite easy. Plus there’s that nice big button at the bottom that says “Put house to sleep”. If you’re really feeling lazy, all you have to do is press that button and CQC and zWave will take care of the rest. The only way it could be easier is if you had a big red easy button 

Now for most homes, that would be the end of the story. Not in my house. Perhaps in the middle of the night, you suddenly remember you’re out of milk and the kids will be upset in the morning. You run out of the house to get some (leaving the spouse at home with the kids of course), but you forget to turn off (or on) one of the lights. Not to worry, zWave to the rescue again! Simply take out your PDA cellphone (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/cellphone.JPG) , pull up the CQC UI (http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/PPC/ppc_overview.jpg ) and turn on/off any lights you want. While you’re there, you can check on the motion and if anyone has called while you were out.

Nice!
I'm hoping to tackle my security project this summer. However, unlike you ;) , I only need the security panel to automate the outdoor and maybe 2 indoor lights.
At this time, I'm seriously considering using an Elk panel, but haven't looked deeply enough to decide on the gold or ez. Maybe I'll pick your brain when I'm ready to buy :)

Nope, can't help you - i hate to talk about my experience ( :) kidding of course).

IIRC, the HAI is cheaper and may be able to do that. If cost is a concern, that is. I wouldn't be able to help much with that, but it is a legit option.

I got what boys like, I got what boys want - my holy grail of integrated HA/HT! I've been salivating about this for 14 months - the ability to use a custom UI to control *everything* I do. I had it all except SageTV, and now I have that!

Here's my sageTV recordings, viewable and playable directly from within a custom built CQC UI, where I have receiver/any other device control on the same page!

The driver is still in alpha, so all the recorded detail isn't yet available (ie, see the show description, recorded time, etc, before you play), but the ability to use one of the major DVR players (ie, SageTV, MCE, or VMC) to display info on a custom UI with HA controls is a major major leap forward!

The watch show button immediately starts playing the show within sage, no menu browsing necessary.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_now_playing.jpg

very nice, i cant wait till i can get back into mine with some sort of force... when i do i hope you dont mind me picking your brain.

Is it just me or is the show name and the guide data not in sync? I am talking about in the Currently Selected Show box in the lower right hand side. It lists the show as Dora, but has a description from Clifford. :eek: ;)

Very nice though.

Oho, you must have young kids!

Yeah, I clued into that after taking it. The way zap2it works (which feeds SageTV which feeds CQC), not everything has a description. But, the way I had set it up, i wasn't clearing out that field before setting it. I clicked on Clifford, then Dora, then took the screencap. Hey, I warned you it was still in alpha :)

I already mentioned this to beelzerob (dude who wrote it), and he already put in a workaround in the driver where if there's no description, it'll say "no description available".

He's working on one other bit which is to display the upcoming recordings. Once that's done, i'll reinstall it and retake the screenshot.

Life just gets better and better. Check that shot out again 2 posts ago, and now this too. Sage Recording schedule and all recorded details from within CQC.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_now_playing.jpg

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/popup_tvshow.jpg

I have just had the most brilliant realization - this opens up that TV integration that I was contemplating several months back. for example, Of pure visibility from any of my touchpanels is only the beginning. Now that I have access to this data, there's other things I can do given that I'm using a fullblown HA engine. For example, one very real thing is that if the doorbell or telephone rings and I'm watching TV and:

1) the TV show category is *not* childrens, and
2) The callerid isn't on some form of blocking rules I come up with, and
3) Timeslot is within certain parameters THEN

pause the TV show automatically so I can deal with the interruption.

Ok, maybe those rules aren't exactly correct, but you get the point. True integration across house subsystems is not a good thing, it is the best of things.

I've been meaning to do this, but a CQC'er asking questions about how to enhance his integration pushed me.

Here's a list of the events i'm currently using. I've got a feeling that some of these are redundant and could be merged, still shaking bugs out of some others, and there's a few i'm thinking I need but I haven't yet done. It is the current list, however.

There's 9 scheduled & 54 triggered. Actually I just deleted 2 that I was trying to use for the Elk phone integration, as I'm currently unable to get that working correctly. It's another one of those "round tuits" type things.

Scheduled

# Title
1) HVAC: Start at 7:10am on M/W/F
2) HVAC: Start at 7:20am on T/X
3) Lighting: DenFloor ON at 8pm on S/T/X/S
4) Lighting: DenFloor OFF at 11:30pm on S/T/X/S
5) Lighting: LivRmFloor ON at 8pm on M/W/F
6) Lighting: LivRmFloor OFF at 11:30pm on M/W/F

7) AV: Reload HD Trailer XML

8) Sprinkler: Turn on at 9pm on M/W/F
9) Sprinkler: Turn off at 9:15pm on M/W/F


Triggered

# Title Description
1) AVCloset-777-Monitor Helps workaround the poor 777 protocol

2) Den-PushButton Light Switch Turn zwave light on/off with the pushbutton lightswitch on Elk

3) Elk Disarmed Reset the HouseIsArmed variable

4) Entry: AutoLightAfterDark Turn on Entry Light if there's motion after dark
5) Entry: ElkF6 Toggle Light Toggle the Entry Light if F6 is pressed

6) FamRm: AVPower If both the Denon and Concerto zone are on, set AVPower to true, else false
7) FamRm: AVSource Compound field to track Concerto & Denon source inputs
8) FamRm: IR Exit Intelligent control over IR
9) FamRm: IR Guide Intelligent control over IR
10) FamRm: IR Left Intelligent control over IR
11) FamRm: IR Menu Intelligent control over IR
12) FamRm: IR Pause Intelligent control over IR
13) FamRm: IR-Down Intelligent control over IR
14) FamRm: Ir-Enter Intelligent control over IR
15) FamRm: IR-Info Intelligent control over IR
16) FamRm: IR-Next Intelligent control over IR
17) FamRm: IR-Play Intelligent control over IR
18) FamRm: IR-Prev Intelligent control over IR
19) FamRm: IR-Right Intelligent control over IR
20) FamRm: IR-Stop Intelligent control over IR
21) FamRm: IR-Up Intelligent control over IR
22) FamRm: Start AV on Sage Play Make sure Denon is set correctly if Sage starts playing

23) On Burglar Alarm Turn on all lights, stereo zones, irrigation on alarm

24) Patio Switch Flipped turn on patio concerto zone, set to XM, set XM to #20

25) HouseArmed15Mins TimeDelay field for "Motion since armed" fields

26) Timer: BRNook Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
27) Timer: BRNook-Motion-Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
28) Timer: Den Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
29) Timer: Den-Motion-Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
30) Timer: Door Front Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
31) Timer: Door-Back Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
32) Timer: Door-Basement-Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
33) Timer: Door-Basement-Motion-Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
34) Timer: Door-OuterFront-Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
35) Timer:Door-OuterFront-Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
36) Timer: Entry Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
37) Timer: Entry Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
38) Timer: Entry Motion Expired (1Min) Turn Entry Light off
39) Timer: FamRm Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
40) Timer: FamRm Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
41) Timer: Hallway Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
42) Timer: Hallway Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
43) Timer: KBR Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
44) Timer: KBR Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
45) Timer: Kitchen Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
46) Timer: Kitchen Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
47) Timer: LivDinRm Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
48) Timer: LivDinRm Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
49) Timer: MBR Motion Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"
50) Timer: MBR Motion Expired Timers to set "Motion, Recent Motion, Since Armed, or None"

51) Turn off House upon ArmedAway Turn off lights, stereos, etc.

52) MBR: Turn off Closet Light if door closed self-explanatory
53) MBR: Turn off Closet Light if Inactive for 15mins self-explanatory
54) MBR: Turn On Closet Light if door opened self-explanatory

Two things happened today, both CCTV related:

I assembled my new Core2Duo system, which will house both SageTV and AverMedia, as well as (hopefully) the database server.

1) What happens when you use a legit piece of hardware (AverMedia NV5000) & software? You spend all of 15 minutes setting it up! (well, the CCTV bit anyhow). That includes both the server software and the PDA bit.

2) I went out for dinner. When I got there, I got a page from NextAlarm telling me the house had been armed & disarmed with my code. I was a little perturbed as I had left the house 90 minutes beforehand, but the timestamp was 2 minutes beforehand. I quickly pulled up CQC on the PDA, noticed the Elk was still armed. I pulled up the cameras, realized all was good, resumed fun.

yet again proof that the value-add of PDA control may not be in actually controlling your devices (although I did forget the lights off, so I had to turn those on via the phone), but will definitely help in the piece of mind arena.

Here's a pic of how it looks on the PC. Obviously this screencap isn't going to work long-term, but after long last i've got my CCTV back, *and* I can easily minimize this application and run whatever else I want. CollinR of LowVoltageSolutions (the dude who is helping me with this) is working with me to modify the html code to make it a little cleaner. Let's hope that all works out fine.


http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_cameras.jpg

Check this out - now THIS is why I don't go with the lowest price dealer, but rather someone who'll help me out. I spent some time with CollinR at LowVoltageSolutions on the phone this am (hence the tease) - he wrote a snippet of code that will allow me to choose which camera i'm pulling up with a CQC command button!

Unfortunately, command buttons mean a smaller display size (352x2something), but the ease of use may win out there.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_camera_front1.jpg

Plus, if I want to use the regular AverMedia code, I can see all of them with that last button which will get me the full size shot you saw earlier. Cramming all the Avermedia code there gets a bit ugly, not sure how long that'll last.

So net net: If you guys want to do this, email CollinR - that guy rocks.

Man, is this guy good or this guy good.

Check out the latest javascript CollinR sent me - clean, easy, custom-fitting quad cam in CQC via a command button (see bottom left). I pulled out the cable for cam4 by mistake, i'll go fix it tomorrow.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_camera_quad.jpg

Well, when you're on the bleeding edge, you tend to get bloody. My god did I get bloody over the past 2 days.

Rather than go through all the painful, bloody, gory, icky, maddening, idiotic details, I'll net this out and spare you all.
A) The AverMedia software WILL NOT work if you have *any* other tuner cards in the system other than the NV5000.
B) The AverMedia software WILL NOT work with AMD cpus.

of course, A+B=
C) You CANNOT use the same machine for AverMedia CCTV and SageTV.


But there is good news:
D) You CAN use the same machine for AverMedia CCTV and CQC master server.
E) The NV5000 TV-out loop works just fine, and I plugged it into a PVR250 so I can now pull up the CCTVs through SageTV. Most importantly, I can do it via the MVP too, so now i can pull that up on any TV. I gotta learn how to use that remote, so I can just punch in the channel # if i'm watching TV to see who's at the door.
F) JKMonroe is tackling the rfID, small cheap tablets, and other stuff, so at least I won't get bloody everywhere. (ok, maybe that's just good news for me)

Basically, I ended up playing a massive game of musical chairs, and swiped the new PC i built for the kids. After hours of bleeding (literally too, i scraped a metal thingey with my wrist and bled on the basement floor), my setup is now:

CQC Master Server plus AverMedia CCTV:
- Intel D865GLC motherboard, 2.8GHz cpu, and 1GB of DDR400 RAM. 250GB for CCTV recording, 200GB disk for a "backup" partition although that's way overkill
- Moxa card, internal PCI modem,AverMedia means i'm maxed out on damn PCI slots!

SageTV Server plus MS SQL Server Express:
- E6600, 1GB RAM.
- 2 PVR250's (1 for D*, 1 for the CCTV inbound), 1 VBox (HD). No more PCI slots here either!

Kids PC:
- AMD2500. Good to know that Caillou and Clifford games seem to work fine so far.

I'm beat. Thank god i'm taking this week off work, it's 2pm, went to bed at 2:30am, up at 8am, i haven't eaten breakfast yet, and there's 14 neighbors coming to a little "how-to" seminar i'm having for CCTV setup. It is abundantly clear that I need to get a beer immediately.

At least you have something to show your neighbors!

I can see it now..... IVB "Welcome everyone, I know you came to see my set up. I've been bragging about it for a while now (and rightly so), but I've had a little computer problem, and well........there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing (not even the weaher on CQC) to see right now.....Enjoy yourself, but I am heading back to the basement where my wife has set a cot up for me and told me I cannot come out until everthing is working again.......See you at Christmas...."

Man, is this guy good or this guy good.

Check out the latest javascript CollinR sent me - clean, easy, custom-fitting quad cam in CQC via a command button (see bottom left). I pulled out the cable for cam4 by mistake, i'll go fix it tomorrow.


Looks great!
I'd like tilt/pan buttons for Web-cams that support it. I'll be looking at this when I move into the new house and get set up. In the meantime... any ideas on that?

At least you have something to show your neighbors!

I can see it now..... IVB "Welcome everyone, I know you came to see my set up. I've been bragging about it for a while now (and rightly so), but I've had a little computer problem, and well........there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing (not even the weaher on CQC) to see right now.....Enjoy yourself, but I am heading back to the basement where my wife has set a cot up for me and told me I cannot come out until everthing is working again.......See you at Christmas...."

Bite your tongue, man, it went great! Well, ok, I can't get my PDA to work with it after the switch, that's probably some damn setting somewhere.

Looks great!
I'd like tilt/pan buttons for Web-cams that support it. I'll be looking at this when I move into the new house and get set up. In the meantime... any ideas on that?
I don't actually know squat about that, but I know Brandon over at Automated Outlet knows tons - he was actually on the phone the entire time, answering questions I didn't know the answer to. (ie, why is the software so bound to hardware cards for CCTV? because it has to be encrypted so that it can be entered into evidence legally. Or something like that).

I just typed up this summary of my Monday night CCTV meeting and sent it out. Dang my neighbors loved it; it's not really that insightful, but I s'pose if you've not had any exposure to CCTV, this could help.
------------------------------------------
Why I put up cameras:

- 55% of the value to me was the ability to remotely view the cameras over my cellphone in the event of a false alarm. I’ve had 2 instances over the past 6 months where I was erroneously contacted, and the ability to confirm that everything was fine gave me piece of mind. Once was when I was alone and wife/kids were out of town, so I was definitely a little skittish about potentially coming home to a robbery in progress, and it’s not like I’d want to ask my neighbors to put themselves in harms way by checking it out. The police will start charging for false alarms, so this was a simple way of confirming that life was good.

- 45% of the value to me was security in case the bad guys do come. Of that 45%, there’s 2 components:

o Recording what’s happening on the sidewalk outside my house in the event of a mugging there or someone running away from a mugging, so there’s legit evidence of what happened. (ie, no need for Neighborhood Watch Network emails with text-based and potentially vague descriptions about who was the guy who robbed you/broke into your car, but an actual picture.

o Recording of the bad guys stealing my stuff. This is clearly the smallest overall percentage since my stuff will still be gone, but hopefully this will help the police somewhat.



What equipment you need:

1) Cameras. The sweet spot is from $125 to $175, my Vitek brand, night vision color 1/3” 480line cameras are $156 if you get them from automatedoutlet.com.

2) Either:

a. A CCTV DVR, which is basically a tivo-type unit with camera inputs and specialized software. This runs anywhere from $700-$2000, based on # of cameras you want to record, quality, internet/PDA viewing.

b. A CCTV card for computer. This could run $150->$1000, mine cost $400 and is a pretty dang decent one. It’s the AverMedia NV5000. It’s very picky though and only works on Intel computers (not AMD). If you opt for the same card I have and are computer-savvy, you can read through the hardware recommendations on the AverMedia site. Warning, it’s pretty technical, as I’m sure they need to legally defend themselves (http://www.avermedia.com/nvd/hardware-recom.asp)

You do NOT need both the computer and the DVR, it’s one or the other



3) Cabling to run from the camera to the PC or DVR (unless you get wireless cameras, which I know very little about since I don’t have them). You can use either

a. CAT5 network cable with adapters on the end, or

b. RG6 (video signal) and 18gauge/2 conductor (for low-voltage power).



How hard is it:

- If you’re comfortable with getting up on a ladder, have easy access to your attic, and know how to use a drill, this is pretty basic stuff. The first time you drill a hole through your outer wall is a little freaky, but once you get in the attic and look around at how craftsman style homes are built, you realize that it’s all very very simple.



Other thoughts:

- Consider camera placement before purchasing cameras. If you’re only going to have one, then putting up high where you just grab a shot of the top of the perpetrator’s head isn’t going to be useful as all a jury will ever think is “yes, the suspect had a bald spot”. If you have more than one, that’s less of an issue.

- If you’re going to go through this hassle, don’t skimp on the most important bit and get a cheapo camera. Keep in mind that the jury system requires “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”, so getting something cheap and grainy won’t really help you that much if the bad guys come knocking.

My god I seriously hate technology at times.

I've been fighting with my new E6600 Server to stream HD to my MVP's. I set all the damn filters, I made sure I had 64K drive units, everything. Turns out that all my testing coincidentally has been with video recorded on my 250GB IDE. I thought I noticed some slowness today, so I physically checked to find a recording that was on my 400GB SATA with the 16MB cache.

Turns out it streams fine, at least with my sample run of 1 10second clip just now, off that SATA. I'm going to rip out the IDE, spit on it, and never have it besmirch my existence again. Don't know why it's so slow, don't care.

And in another big angst, the serial port decided to stop tuning the DTV box decided today. Oy, I hate this new server! I doubt its the DTV box or SageTV, but i'll try that tomorrow. I've got no more PCI slots in it to try another serial port, i'll have to sleep on it and decide what to do. I don't really feel like buying a USB->Serial adapter just to try this elsewhere, no energy to try another mobo, clearly I just need more to drink.

stream HD to my MVP's.
How are you streaming HD to a MVP? Did you modify one?

No, via SageTV. SageTV records OTA HD and DirecTV SD, and the MVP connects to SageTV, displays the SageTV screen, and I can select whatever I want.

In attempting to fix my DTV tuning issues, i've done something bad to destabilize that box, and I need to reformat and start over from scratch.

This is exactly why I always tell people that DIY takes at least twice as long as it should, and why the pro's stick with known good hardware configurations with as much standardization as possible. In retrospect, I should have gotten the same exact mobo I used for my C2D HTPC; i know how to make that work, and it was only $50 more.

Clearly the only thing to do is to go to the fish store with my kids and buy some more fish and food, and walk away from the HAPCs until late tonight.

1) Cameras. The sweet spot is from $125 to $175, my Vitek brand, night vision color 1/3” 480line cameras are $156 if you get them from automatedoutlet.com.


IVB - First I wanted to thank you for the HA meeting last night, it was excellent & it really got me thinking about what I 'could' do.

I also have a CCTV setup that I can view through my cell phone (via Geovision). I have some junky Ebay weatherproof cameras that have a decent picture during the day, but the IR at night is almost unviewable due to the 'halo' effect. My cameras are almost 2 years old at this point & they do work fine, but they are useless at night.

Do you find that your outdoor night vision works enough to see anything?

EDIT: I couldnt find the camera on AO - Do you have a link or some specs?



A second question - Do you (or can you) use Zwave to control an attic fan (whole house fan)? I am not sure about the AMP's but can you control an adjustable (dial) fan using Zwave (or another protocol)?

Thanks,
Rich

IVB - First I wanted to thank you for the HA meeting last night, it was excellent & it really got me thinking about what I 'could' do.

I also have a CCTV setup that I can view through my cell phone (via Geovision). I have some junky Ebay weatherproof cameras that have a decent picture during the day, but the IR at night is almost unviewable due to the 'halo' effect. My cameras are almost 2 years old at this point & they do work fine, but they are useless at night.

Do you find that your outdoor night vision works enough to see anything?

I can see that there's something there, wouldn't be able to use it to id anyone in a court of law. I have motion lights that trigger on, which enables that.

EDIT: I couldnt find the camera on AO - Do you have a link or some specs?

this is it. (http://www.automatedoutlet.com/product.php?productid=1285&cat=27&page=2)




A second question - Do you (or can you) use Zwave to control an attic fan (whole house fan)? I am not sure about the AMP's but can you control an adjustable (dial) fan using Zwave (or another protocol)?

Thanks,
Rich
I'm currently begging AO and Intermatic to let me have some of their beta zWave AC outlets (currently due out in June). In that case I'll use zWave to turn on/off a bathroom fan that i've got mounted in my loft to vent that room.

Dunno how you'd do adjustable though - can't dial down the amps as it'll burn out the motor.

We are not having fun. We put the following post on SageTV's hardware support forum at 12:30am last night.

As you mostly know by now, i've had some very significant issues after switching to my new server. I made the mistake of getting a budget MSI Neo3-F motherboard for my E6600 box, but let me describe what i've done and see where your fresh/independent eyes can help.

What i'm looking for isn't an answer to all my problems (although that would be nice), it's more "hey, these are the steps you should try next".

-------------------------------
Ok, here's the facts:

1) Old server was an absolute rock, worked just fine. I had 1 PVR250 and 1 VBox DTA-150 for HD. I had a D11-500 DTV Box that worked just fine with the paterson cable. But, it was an AMD2500 Asus A7N8X-E and had a hard time rendering HD to the MVP, plus I need to run a database server so I upgraded.

2) New server is an MSI Neo3-F. I built it <6 days ago, seemed to work just fine, but yesterday it suddenly started popping random errors. It stopped being able to tune the DTV box.

So today, I reformatted the new server and slowly put everything back on. Here's my current problems:

1) Vbox tuner driver doesn't want to load, but the capture driver works just fine
2) PVR250 seemed to install just fine, but upon selecting it as a video source, it wouldn't let me configure tuning.
3) DTVControl utility connects to COM1 just fine, but on pressing a command it ends with "timeout". It sends a command, claims it's a valid command, but the last line is timeout. (Is that a problem or is that standard?). I downloaded the latest paterson firmware to the cable, and the latest firmware to the DTV box itself, so it's not that.

So I decide that it's late, and thank god I didn't reformat the old server (gave it to my kids), so i'm pulling it back and popping the PVR250/VBox back in. This leads to my last problem
4) The old box, which was working fine, still works fine with the VBox HD tuner. But, it looks like the D11-500 still won't accept tuning.

So at this point i'm gonna sleep on it, see if I can get some epiphany in my sleep, but given that I just reformatted the new box totally and I still can't get the PVR250 to tune, plus given that I can't get the D11-500 to tune, plus that vbox error, i'm wondering exactly how many different pieces are currently failing.

I'm also strongly contemplating RMA'ing the MSI to newegg and searching the SageTV forums for a known workiing LGA 775 mobo in it's place, so I at least take one variable out of the equation.

Any assistance or independent guidance is greatly appreciated.

IVB - Are you using any other wall dimmers aside from the Intermatic 300 watt dimmers (or any other zwave in wall lighting units)? I see Intermatic only has the one in wall unit.

I have the ACT inwall 600W 3way dimmers, but I can't figure out which of the 7 wiring "standards" the former owners used so i'm going to have to call an electrician to mount them.

Some interesting movements lately in the whole house audio area:

1) Outdoor Audio: With all the *fabulous* weather we've been having on the West Coast, we've been spending darn near every day in the backyard. That light switch I rigged up on the patio, run to the Elk has been a runaway success. For those of you who weren't following, flipping that switch has CQC automatically set XM to channel 20, turn on the patio zone, set a specified volume. Sure, we'd love the ability to switch stations or pick a CD, but when we're actually sitting on the patio it takes a lot of energy to walk the 10' inside the house to change stations, and channel 20 is "good enough" for background listening 99% of the time when we just don't feel like moving.

2) Audio w/keypads: Mounting those cheap $125 eBay'ed Concerto Keypads was also a great idea. We listen to the music *much more* in the 2nd tier rooms (ie bathroom), and find ourselves and the kids being just a little happier in the mornings as the kids like to "dance on their clothes" (basically wiggle their bottoms to the music while putting on their pants). Hey, they're 5 & 3, it's the simple fun things in the morning that make life smoother. Considering it used to take acts of god, screaming, and crying to make them wear their clothes, we're digging that.

3) Newest Interesting Whole House Audio Idea: Given that we only use 1 of the 4 M-Audio analog pairs, i'm going to use 2 or 3 of the remaining pairs to "mock up my own stations. I'll setup multiple instances of the CQC audio player (no need for zoomplayer anymore), and continuously broadcast "Classic Rock that IVB likes" on source #2, approved kids music (ie, certain J.T. songs, Kelly Clarkson, etc) on source #3, perhaps "R&B/Soul/Rap that the wife likes" on source #4. That way we can just use the keypads source buttons to quickly select those sources in case we ever get sick of XM but don't feel like walking 20' to the touchscreen to change the songs.

I just got my qkits QK011 temp board & sensors in the mail (get temp over RS232 - CQC driver exists). My god these things are TINY!

Here's a pic next to a business card. Honestly, the wiring is going to be thicker than the damn sensor, now I have a whole different problem to solve (how to patch up the hole in the wall without the sensor falling through).

Bye bye big ugly elk temp sensor on the wall of the MBR that the wife hates, hello tininess!
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/qk011_sensor.JPG

What a nice weekend I've had. Well, mixed results, but still movement.

The good:

I just had the absolute *smoothest* motherboard install i've ever had, so much so that i'm going to specifically recommend this Intel 965P Core2Duo motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813121052) for anyone looking for something nice, simple, stable, and with RAID0+1 and RAID5 on the mobo to boot.

I got it for my SageTV server. I was able to put 5 SATA drives in, and in a matter of literally seconds after the first power-up, set it up so that SATA0 was the boot, 1-3 were the 500GB sata that I wanted in a RAID5, and SATA4 was a 400GB I wanted as standalone. It all just worked.

Plus I migrated my SageTV server over and it started up just fine. I can watch OTA digital on the MVP, still can't do HD transcoding on the fly. I'm contemplating migrating to SageTV 6.1 which I heard solves many issues, but 24 is on tomorrow night so I may hold off until Thursday (after American Idol/etc).

I was also able to use a PVR500, with 1 input for the CCTV, and 1 input for the DirecTV.


The Bad
I still can't get the D* STB to tune, but i've now clearly proven that it's either the cable or the STB. I believe i'm at the latest firmware, but i'll force-check tomorrow. I've currently only got HBO enabled, so at least I can watch Sopranos and Entourage.

I also still can't get the damn DataLogDB driver to work with mySQL. Works just fine with SQLServer Express, but I want to start making some progress against the myhomecookingpc.com stuff. It's simple to move mySQL databases around, no way to move SSE db's around in an automated fashion. I guess I could have 2 db engines up & running (one for datalogdb, one for myhomecookingpc.com), as it is a Core2Duo box, but that just seems so wasteful.

And, another sad note, we've had 3 incidents of crime in the local vicinity in the past 7 days. Rather than wait for me to run wire to the windows for the sensors, I just ordered the new Elk wireless receiver (out Tuesday), and a crapload of wireless sensors. I also got some keyfobs, so I'll be able to do keychain control of CQC shortly. That'll be nice (ie, turn on lights and turn up heat on the push of a button). I may also replace the outer doors, in which case I may do an electric strike for the same thing.

So, even more movement into the advanced areas.

I've read the reviews on Newegg about this baord and they say it's picky about hte RAM you use. What RAM did you use with it? I'm interested in getting this to replace an old file server and make it a file server/Sage TV Server.

Also what CPU are you using with it? I'm guessing with a PVR250 and PVR150 that a E6400 (or the E6420 with 4MB Cache) would handle things just fine.



A side question - Will the SageTV Server work OK as a client? Say I have the SageTV Server in my office, and instead of streaming the content from the server to an extender or anohter PC in my office, could I just use the server as a client for myself? Right now it'll all be SDTV content.

rgroves, Cinemar uses that Intel motherboard for it's HTPC and light servers. We use Corsair Ballistix DDR2 800 2) 1 gig. The voltage is the spec that reduces choices. Corsair certifies this Ram for this MB.

I've read the reviews on Newegg about this baord and they say it's picky about hte RAM you use. What RAM did you use with it? I'm interested in getting this to replace an old file server and make it a file server/Sage TV Server.

I used 2 sticks of Corsair 512MB RAM (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820145568). I haven't yet had a chance to run burn-in tests in this config, as I ran out of time before The Sopranos last night, but i'll do that later on this week.

Also what CPU are you using with it? I'm guessing with a PVR250 and PVR150 that a E6400 (or the E6420 with 4MB Cache) would handle things just fine.

I overarchitected given that I want to use this as a SageTV server, HD on the fly transcoding to high quality, and a db server - I got an E6600. As mentioned, i've got issues with HD transcoding, but i'm hoping V6.1 will address that.


A side question - Will the SageTV Server work OK as a client? Say I have the SageTV Server in my office, and instead of streaming the content from the server to an extender or anohter PC in my office, could I just use the server as a client for myself? Right now it'll all be SDTV content.
Oh yeah, sure, I did that for probably 2 years. I had my single HTPC act as the SageTV Server *and* CQC server (back when I was doing much less CQC).

The primary destabilizer is the video rendering, and the muckage the HTPC community inevitably does to filters/etc. If you can get it going and leave well enough alone, your setup will be fine with a SageTV server acting as a client.

http://www.elkproducts.com/latest_news.htm

PRODUCT RELEASES
A v a i l a b l e N o w !

ELK-M1XRF2G
M1 Crystal Wireless Receiver


Mine was pre-ordered last week (along with a *crapload* of other stuff). Hopefully by this weekend i'll have:

- Elk Wireless Receiver installed
- Some of my wireless window receivers installed (both recessed and surface mount)
- Keyfob working

I was going to hardwire all my windows, but some of them have A/C lines underneath them and retrofitting the hardwire in would have been beyond my skillset. Downside is that i'll have to deal with battery replacements every 2-4 years, but at least i'll be able to get *every* window done. Given the recent crime wave, I don't want to risk the bad guys using the 1 window I didn't wire up to come in.

On an upnote that could potentially have a *huge* impact, someone on the SageTV forums showed me to you can remotely control the $100 MVP!

Whoa! I had no idea. I never touch the server, never bothered installing the webserver there until tonight. (i use it on the sagetvclient).

If beelzerob can find a way to control a $100 MVP via CQC, then this changes everything, and (in my mind) suddenly thrusts SageTV into a very very strong position vis-a-vis any other DVR package, including Vista. It would be simple to a handful of MVPs in a central location, and have truly zero equipment in a room for control.

Check it out. this is via the SageTV web server, but if he can figure out how to do this via native CQC widgets, then I think what you get for $700 just got noticeably noticeably better. No more $300 xBox360's.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/images/sage-extender.JPG

How much do I hate Home Automation sometimes, let me count the ways. I spent another 1.5 hours tonight trying to get the damn DirecTV STB to work over serial to no avail. This is a hardware level thing, i can't get any program to change the damn channel.

If IR wasn't so sucky, i'd go with that in a heartbeat.

Which STB are you using?
If one of the USB flavors, are you using the correct USB <> serial adapter?

How I spent another 1.5 hours tonight trying to get the damn DirecTV STB to work over serial to no avail. This is a hardware level thing,
I can't remember which model it was, (I'm thinking D10 or 11) but D* sent down a software update that killed the serial port. TiVo owners were hopping mad.

Which STB are you using?
If one of the USB flavors, are you using the correct USB <> serial adapter?
Yeah; it worked totally fine for weeks (brand new STB), just started having issues after a power outage.

I can't remember which model it was, (I'm thinking D10 or 11) but D* sent down a software update that killed the serial port. TiVo owners were hopping mad.

Oy, what! When? It's a D11-500, and indeed after a power-loss the STB will download the latest firmware. Supposedly some of the SageTV folks had the same issue and just got this working again, so I'm not throwing in the towel quite yet.

When? It's a D11-500,
Then its not that issue. I checked and it was the D10. So if you had it working recently, that is not your problem. Just make sure you are using the APG serial command set.

Thought I'd let you all know how the remote capabilities have been helping me lately.

I've pulled up CQC on the PDA quite often lately from the office/road/etc. 90% of the time it was via the webserver as I can get that up within probably 3-4seconds over Cingular's network and given that it was just me, text was fine. 10% of the time I wanted control so I used the DotNetViewer, as I don't know or want to learn CML which is required for control via the webserver, plus I have zero desire to open up firewall ports for http traffic controlling my house:

Here's what I did:
1) See if the wife is home, cuz she's not answering her cell or the house phone and we're trying to arrange for logistics for roughly 19K random events in the next month.
2) Wife asked me to check on who called last night as we were expecting an important call and the dimwit hadn't called us before we had to go. (the extent of our phone integration - if we had a call, we'd just call the house to see if there was a message).
3) Disarm the security system so one of our "less than intelligent" friends could go get something from our house (he has a spare key) without tripping the alarm like he did last time.
4) Start a DVD for the babysitter who barely understands how to turn a TV on. She's smart enough to put a DVD in a drive, but I swear the teeny-bopper is baffled by the concept of a stereo system, and I weep for the future.

Furthermore, we've also noticed that the wife's 3G cellphone isn't necessarily that much faster than mine. Even pulling up regular web pages seems to take quite a long time, much much longer than a PC. We ran some tests with them side-by-side, phone got dusted each time, not sure if it's a firmware issue or just network slowness.

Super Super Super Cool! Hats off to Robertmee, and *thank god* I got those concerto keypads, I can now use them to control CQC!

Specifically I've so far set it up so that the next/prev/etc buttons control the CQC CD player, but it looks like you can do buckets with this. I'm going to see how to use the digits to change XM stations. And for that eye-candy, supposedly he's using it put the song information on the keypad when it's changed but only on the keypads in zones that are actually on and tuned to that source. Seems eminently doable. The other supercool thing is that you can detect which zone's keypad was used, so you can build additional logic. For example, I may put a keypad in my kids room, and set it up so that as soon as the zone is turned on via the keypad it's set to XM disney or some such thing.

Very cool stuff.

And another very productive day. I got the Elk wireless M1XRF, and inside of 3.5 hours I had added it onto the Elk system, and mounted 15 wireless recessed window sensors (http://www.automatedoutlet.com/product.php?productid=400&cat=0&page=1) and added them into the ElkRP & panel! And in true DIY fashion, I only broke one sensor (don't ask), and only needed gorilla glue on three windows (don't tell wife).

I still have all these damn wired recessed window sensors that I was going to use, but I just didn't have anymore time plus we've now had 10 muggings or armed robberies in 10 weeks in the general vicinity and we wanted more protection quicker. (police crackdown in Inner Oakland basically pushed crime out to the outlying areas.)

I also found out the Elk has three arming modes: Away, Stay, and Night. I put some of the windows into the Night mode, so we can open/close them during the day if the Elk happens to be in Stay mode. I don't actually know how to use the Elk Keypad to put it into "Night" mode, but I know how to do that through CQC so I may just stick with a screen to do that.

I played around with the overview screen, here's what I got. I'm contemplating adding an "ArmStay" and an "ArmNight" button with the security code hardcoded so I don't need a keypad, but not sure how smart an idea that is.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_house_overview.jpg

Ho ho, I am on an absolute TEAR this weekend.

Ideas implemented in the last 24 hours:
1) Sound/Voice Stuff
Well, I got ideas from 3 different folks in 3 different forums, but in typical IVB fashion I went waaay over the top with it. Well, I only got the basics done to-date, but i'm setup well for future.
1a) Custom sound playback over HA Elk speakers for callerID. I recorded my M.I.L.'s voice saying "it's me, why aren't you picking up the phone", and that'll get played everytime the phone rings and CID says it's her. Plus, since i'm using a PC, i've got unlimited .WAV capacity, so I can record a different voice/.WAV file for each person.
My wife gets bugged because if the phone rings, I *never* move to get it - 90% of the time it's for her. She always yells at me saying it could be the one time someone calls for me, but now we'll hear it and not in that generic ass M$ TTS voice. I told the wife about this, in typical wife form she shrugged her shoulders and asked why we need it.
Doesn't she know by now? It's not for her, it's for me, and so I don't have to do anything when the phone rings and it's her.

1b) Ripped out doorchime, ran wires to Elk for custom doorbell ring. That's boring, but i've been meaning to do something similar for a year now, since i was redoing the wiring for all the speakers i just got off my ass to do it.

1c) Bought a mixer so that I can re-use those same speakers for the Elk M1 output, PC (both TTS and custom WAV), whatever else I want.

Now I know all that's pretty straight-forward, but I think it's pretty impressive since I had to run all new wiring for the Elk speakers that those are running through. Plus I got the wiring done for adding another 3 speakers hooked up to the relays. This lays the groundwork for both
- Intruder warning on any non-alarm violation (ie, motion in entryway or backdoor detected)
- RFID greeting when it sees me come home

2) Nuvo Concerto control over CQC.
Given that I can now trap that a particular keypad pressed a button in CQC, i set it up so that pressing the AUX button will run the same weather script that we have going off in the AM.

3) Keyfob control
- got the keyfob hooked into CQC. I won't do remote disarms with it, but i did link the lighting button tonight. It'll be one of those things I gotta sit with to see what I want to do with it.

Well, it only took 14 months of having the stuff in my parts closet, but I finally have zoned HA announcements including doorbell ring, CallerID, and TTS! Not completely done, but 80% of the way there.

I created 3 zones of HA announcement speakers using the Elk (intentionally not using my A/V speakers). Right now there's only the CQCServer as the source (ie, not the Elk M1 output1), but that does:
1) Doorbell ring (different per door) (ripped out regular doorchime, i'm now Elk-only)
2) Custom WAV playback on callerID. I recorded 4 of our friends so far, and play back their greeting. This is actually the AWESOME bit, as I used strictly CQC for it, meaning I can sell off the Elk-930 Doorbell detector, Elk-120 4channel Recordable board and Elk-129 computer sound interface. And, since I'm using CQC and WAV files, I have infinite file capability.
3) Custom TTS (text to speech). I'll probably get a custom voice, I really want to try out one of the nuance ones as I think my kids would get a kick out of a british female accent, but it's $90 and there's no demo. I know Kate is a tried&true voice, but it just seems so bland.

Some techie details for those of you who care:
- Doorbells are rigged up directly to Elk zones using CAT5, so they're very simple open/close circuits.
- I'm using an Elk-800 amp which can handle 2-16Ohms
- For each zone, I used a relay on the M1XOVR relay expander
- I mounted 3 of the 32Ohm Elk speakers in parallel so I get a 10Ohm resistance on that leg
- I mounted 1 Elk 8 Ohm External speaker and 1 Elk 8Ohm internal speaker on two seperate legs.
- I *will* be added either a 32Ohm single gang speaker or an 8Ohm regular speaker on leg#4, haven't quite decided which form factor I want.

I'd never run all of them together, but even if I did that's still 2.1->2.6Ohms total, which is above the minimum.

If you want to calculate it yourself, the formula for parallel resistance is
1/x = (1/R1) + (1/R2) + (1/R3) + ...
or, to put it simpler
X (resistance) = 1 / ( (1/R1) + (1/R2) + (1/R3) + ... )

Here's the revised overview screen. I know all the HA speakers don't look like that, but the ones my wife can see do, and one icon is simpler than 3.

Final piece is to step down the M1 output to line level and use the $50 mixer i got off eBay to blend those two, and sell off the Elk-930, Elk-120, and Elk-129. If I get decent $$, I may take a gamble on the Nuance voice.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/cleanv1/overlay_house_overview.jpg

Oh, and I just had the coolest idea. Now that I've got the HA announcement stuff setup, I should record myself (or the PC in a Damian-type voice) yelling "get out of my house, you dorko thief, or else i'll release the nerve gas". Then, if there's ever an intrusion, or perhaps at will via the PDA, I could just play that WAV file through every PC and Concerto zone in the whole house.

The Cingular network has been *painfully* slow lately for everything (ie, not just CQC, even surfing the web is awful), but I should try that on the wife's BlackJack/3G cellphone...

Or have a female voice say, "30 seconds until nerve agent release", then "10 seconds...", and then "Releasing nerve agent into ventilation system." Also include descriptive warnings about the agents affects like "The agent will cause uncontrolled muscle spasms, involuntary bowl movements, dizziness, and short-term memory loss, and possibly unconsciousness."

Maybe only announce those INSIDE the house...you may scare the neighbors and alert Homeland Security on you...LOL

What would be really freaky for the intruder would be to also have a fog machine blow some smoke into the air ducts at the time it says releasing agent.

LOL, yes, and also end each announcement with "Have a nice day".

LOL, that would be great. Or record Apu from the Simpson's saying "Thank You, Come again."

other ideas...

"Thank you for flying IVB airlines. Buh-bye....".

"My precious....they took my precious...".

"Terminated".

The Looney Tunes ending "That's all folks".

The Princess Bride "bye bye boys, have fun storming the castle..."

Simpson's - Mr. Burns saying "release the hounds"

Hoho! I got a Gentner AP800 mic mixer/cancellation system off eBay for $77 shipped plus a Crown half-supercardoid mic for $75 shipped to see if VR is really as awful as everyone says.It came with Firmware v1.00, I just upgraded it to Firmware V2.40, and I can connect via HyperTerminal! Not too bad for the pittance of a cost.

Of course, the mic hasn't gotten here yet, let's hope the AP800 actually works, and not just via the serial port. The protocol looks pretty dead bang simple, except for the pesky pick a mic # for each command otherwise i'd be able to bang out a PDL driver for CQC within a few mandays. I say mandays as I have that security 101 thing on Sat, plus a boatload of day job work this week, so i'm not sure how much time i'll have to brush up on my PDL skills. I haven't touched PDL since last Jan, 16 months is a long time to forget that which I didn't really know too well in the first place. Plus I don't really know how to best deal with commands when everyone is in a format where each command has 2 values (1 is channel#, 1 is value, null means you want to read), so I'll have to ask questions there.

Regardless, let's see if I can get an AP800 driver for CQC done in 4-6 weeks. Of course, that's a loooong way from actually doing any VR, but at least being able to control the mixer is step 1. Step 2 is figuring out how to get a command to CQC, if I could figure out what the hell Nuance/DragonNaturallySpeaking meant by some of the jargon on their page I might look into that.

JKMonroe is tightening up the RFid stuff inside CQC, i'm looking more into VR, all I need is help with the recipe db and outlook contacts/callerID db lookup driver, and we'll all be able to start doing some seriously cool HA stuff :)

Ah, there's no such thing as a problem that money can't solve!

Tuning on my DirecTV has been down for 3 weeks ever since I had the power outage thing. Looks like it was the PatersonTech cable, I bought a 2nd one, just got it, plugged it in, it works fine! I just sent them a note asking them how to deal with fixing the old one.

The wife will be very happy - 3 weeks of only one channel of DirecTV (i left it on, with only HBO enabled) made her very sad.

Of course, now that I got a 2nd paterson cable, once it gets fixed I really should just get the 2nd D* STB and have 2 SDTVs recording at once. And I could get an HDHomerun, and get 2 more HDTV streams.

Plus, now that Squintz agreed to do the AP800 driver, looks like that'll actually get done on a timely basis too. Things are looking up in the IVB household!

Nothing like spending hours to stand still outcome-wise. well, not entirely still:

I had to disable the maglock last weekend when I moved the Elk expander to the basement. The wife has actually grown to prefer it as it gives us one additional level of security, and really didn't like not having it. I could have just rerun the wire to the other location, but the current conduit is nearly out of space and, in hindsight, not in the best location. I put in a 2nd conduit, although I could only fit a 1" pipe due to some random stud positioning. Then I reran the wiring for the maglock and got it up & running.

I'm going to link that output to the keyfob I got, plus that might be how we end up using the prox reader I bought but haven't yet mounted. I don't feel comfortable linking the actual Elk to the arm/disarm of a keyfob or a prox reader, but enabling & disabling that maglock might be just the ticket.

Tee Hee Hee, lookie ma, behold the power of my voice! No hands!

Well, I have 10% accuracy to turn my lights on with a ludicriously simple "lights" command using a $10 VRCommander package (i'm on the free trial as I didn't want to pony up the $10) and a cheap $15 computer headset/mic. I can't get it to recognize "lights off" but "lights on" and "lights" seem to work.

It was all pretty righteously simple, albeit highly inaccurate and pretty fragile. I setup a keymapping in CQC so that it would turn on the lights on a shift-F2, then I setup a command in VRCommander so that when I said "lights on" it would send S-F2 to CQC.

Pretty simplistic, but 2 points of issues so far:
1) VRCommander can't understand "lights off", but it can understand "lights on". But this is from a headset 2" from my mouth, and I ain't walkin around with that.
2) In order to do a keystroke command from within CQC, either the Admin Interface or the Interface Viewer needs to have focus. This has a ramification on which PC I put the AP800 at as the HTPC will obviously have video running, and I wouldn't want the whole VR system to be down just because of that.

#2 isn't a huge issue, as the server is headless so it letting the AI be the focus program isn't a problem, but it is point of failure.

Anyhow, i'm just mucking around anyhow until the AP800 driver gets done, at which point i'll try something better than a $15 headset. I may also see if I can find someone who has Dragon Preferred to see if it can translate a voice command into a keystroke (ie, shift-F2).

But it was geeky cool to see the lights turn on by the sound of my voice :-)

Here's 2 screenshots first is of VRCommander, second is CQC.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/vrcommander.JPG

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/keymappings.JPG

It would definitely be way better to do some little XML Gateway based app to use for that kind of thing.

Do you mean to take something like the XP VR SDK, write a (i dunno, C#) app to leverage that and communicate with CQC via XML?

well, momentum seems to be maintaining.

I got RFID working (woohoo!). Seriously simple too, just plug in the RFID receiver to the PC, put 2 AAA batteries in the transmitter (probably about the size of 4-5 of them total. The CQC driver records the tag id, and allows you to rename it.

Plus, the alpha test of the AP800 driver worked fine, so that's cool too!

Here's the only pic I got of the RFID stuff. I'm going to have to muck with positioning & placement as i'm only getting 15' off it, which is barely enough for me to reach the dining room. I need another 20ish feet, then I can use it to tell if i'm home or not. I can put on "coming home" routines based on who's home, and who just arrived (after door is opened, that is).

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/rfid.JPG

I finally put in the VK011 mini-temp sensor board. Great advantage of that is that since it was so cheap, I got 4 sensors for $75 shipped. I actually learned something too after mounting them:

I put 2 sensors in: my basement server room, and the crawlspace. Turns out those rooms aren't nearly as cold as I thought. The server room wasn't that surprising, but the 70degree temp in the crawlspace at 11:00pm at night surprised me. Now I realize why the media closet isn't getting that cool - it's drawing 70deg temp in.

I'm going to hunt down an old style thermometer to verify those temps, it certainly feels colder than 70deg down there, but i've been known to be vastly off temp wise before. If it really is 70, I may start thinking about how to pull in outside air - it's 54 deg outside right now.

Well bada bing! One of the CQC'ers is extending the SageTV driver to be able to control the MVP.

The very first alpha drop of the new control code has this in the debug logfile - that's the show I started on the MVP after loading up the new file!

Although crap, I just realized i'm going to have to run 3RG6 from the basement to the MBR for composite and analog audio distro as i'll be moving the MVP to the basement if it works. The evil downside of centralization - more damn wiring.

Wed 6/27 23:07:40.062 [[SageCQC]]: Setting new media file.
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.062 [[SageCQC]]: Title: Divine Design
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.063 [[SageCQC]]: Desc: Kitchen makeover.
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.063 [[SageCQC]]: IsLive: false
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.063 [[SageCQC]]: GetConfiguration: Initializing Config
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.063 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: PLM:Play
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.063 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CTT:Divine Design
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.064 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CDU:1799838
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.064 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CTM:15
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.064 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CDE:Kitchen makeover.
Wed 6/27 23:07:40.564 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CTM:15
Wed 6/27 23:07:41.141 [[SageCQC]]: Sending data: CTM:16

Looks great!
I'd like tilt/pan buttons for Web-cams that support it. I'll be looking at this when I move into the new house and get set up. In the meantime... any ideas on that?

I don't actually know squat about that, but I know Brandon over at Automated Outlet knows tons - he was actually on the phone the entire time, answering questions I didn't know the answer to. (ie, why is the software so bound to hardware cards for CCTV? because it has to be encrypted so that it can be entered into evidence legally. Or something like that).


Coming soon for Avermedia, I should be able to do it today with Geovision.

I must admit though, I suggest my paying customers NOT go with PTZ cameras but rather more fixed cameras. PTZ for the home is "cool" however ultimately when you really need them somehow they are pointed in the wrong place. So basically if you have someone control it 24/7 it's awesome, otherwise fixed cameras will serve you better in the long run. Also they are cheaper.

Every time I do more and more with HA stuff, I realize how wrong I was 2 years ago when I questioned the value of CIs.

As you can tell by the age of the first post on this thread, i've been taking a very evolutionary & organic growth approach to my setup. I don't actually know everything I want to do, I just know I always want more. And it always seems to need wiring. As a result, my wiring was really unplanned, and has become extremely spaghetti-like. It was getting to the point where I was introducing instability due to wiring/shorts, which is really dumb.

I decided to rip out all my wiring a few days ago and redo it. As I started doing it, I realized I hadn't setup the physical space to be well organized for the amount of wiring I now have. It was fine when I thought there'd only be 15 runs of wire there, but i'm getting up there now, and it's just not working. Well, my rewiring job has turned into a full server room rebuild. I decided that the physical space wasn't really conducive to organized setups, so i've now spent 2.5 days redoing it. Not full days, but the wife has let me spend 4-5 hours per day so far on it.

Now, if I were a CI, first I'd know to plan out the wiring. 2nd, and this is really the bit i'm suffering from now, i'd know how to physically mount the various modules as I'd know which ones take up how much wire, and which ones don't. I kid you not - I spent probably 3 hours just looking and staring at the equipment, both on the floor as I was mocking it up, and again on the wall, trying to figure out how to best position all this stuff so I wouldn't end up with spaghetti again. No idea if I succeeded, time will tell.

Well, my rewiring job has turned into a full server room rebuild. I decided that the physical space wasn't really conducive to organized setups, so i've now spent 2.5 days redoing it. Not full days, but the wife has let me spend 4-5 hours per day so far on it.

Here's what I've got so far. I built a table and mounted the plywood, made all the more difficult by the fact that the room doesn't have square walls or level floors or ceiling. I mounted almost all my stuff. There's only 1 PC there now, the wife is watching SageTV as we speak so I couldn't move the other one. I've also got some very temporary network wiring on the right side, as this is an in-situ rebuild, so i can't take the whole system down for a week without wrath of wife/kids. I just bought a smallish onwall hinged rackmount, 23" high, 12" deep, so I gotta figure out where to put that. The patch panel, switch, and AP800 will go in there. Only two choices are left wall or build a right wall. I'll be building a right wall anyhow as I will have to put a dehumidifer in this room in the winter, and i'd just as soon wall off a 7'x7' area and only dehumidify that rather than the whole room.

i took 2 pics - one with everything mounted and the cans closed, one with the cans open (and a piece of plastic holding up the Elk door). I had a Bosch enclosure, so I put the CCTV power and Rain8Net in there, and I put my DSL modem in the Leviton SMC can.

There's no wires run yet, i'm hoping to redo that over the next 3 days (taking whole week off work). Hopefully it still looks pretty after that.
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/closed.JPG

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/open.JPG

Nice looking start to your "re-wire". One suggestion - On your Elk Panel, you might want to consider having the door open "UP". I know it sounds weird, but if it opens up, you can mount a small hook (or hooks) with a 1-2 link of chain, to the ceiling to hold the door open and it would be out of your way while you work on it. With it opening "down" you have to deal with it possibly being in your way while you wire things up or banging into your monitor ot other stuff on the wall.

That is a great idea; i'll be sure to do that. Dunno why I didn't think of it - i stared at the damn wall long enough.

then again, with it mounted the way it is, with a chain on the inside of the box to the middle of the lid, it becomes a table for your wire crimper, ends, etc. while you are working on it. My question is, why mount it sideways at all? why not top to bottom like the way the box was designed for? The smaller box on the bottom right should then go into the middle row.

My question is, why mount it sideways at all? why not top to bottom like the way the box was designed for? The smaller box on the bottom right should then go into the middle row.

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to ask that - it seemed like the first question I would have :)

The reason is to keep the wiring as clean as possible, and there's 2 bits of info that you don't see in the pic:
1) I have 3 main boards that will have a decent # of wires.
2) On the other side of the wall, my wires run along the ceiling joist.

Hence with a horizontal mount, I can mount the boards as seen, and distribute the 3 sets of wires along a greater distance (28"), while still keeping it close to the ceiling and hence requiring minimal ugliness on that side of the wall.

Mounting it vertically is what I used to have, and required running wiring a longer distance from the ceiling. I personally feel like it made things uglier, as I had 3 different departure points from the same general vertical line. This way I just leave the ceiling joist at 3 different areas, and only need perhaps 12" of wire to reach the boards.

I am so damn sore it's not funny. I ripped out all the wiring back at least 20' from the room so I could introduce cleanly. There were some runs that I had to fully rerun the entire 80' house length because I now realize I did it inefficiently.

Here's a pic of one new idea I had - I was struggling with how i'd rerun this cleanly from the other side. I built a PVC network, with openings right at "wire line". I left the PVC uncemented so I can add wires easily, so it's only held together by tension but that's a damn good fit. Note the left pipe for an example. I'll find out in 1-2 days whether this was very smart or very stupid, but it certainly shows potential.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/conduit.JPG

if you add more wires to a pipe that already has wires....make sure you lube it....even then you can still burn the existing wire easily.

That sounds kind of exciting, but I'm not sure exactly why....

if you add more wires to a pipe that already has wires....make sure you lube it....even then you can still burn the existing wire easily.

By "burn", do you mean "screw up"?

I also was school'ed on the CQC forum about using right-angles meant for water for electrical, so i'm going to pull out all the bends and either just have the 11 pipes running straight out or pull out the PVC entirely. Perhaps this is a really bad idea after all...

I assumed he meant friction burns?

That was actually my question though - to reveal my ignorance, what does friction burn mean when it comes to cabling? The wires (either 2c/4c/8c) are inside a jacket, so how would they be affected?

Well, you could potentially burn through the outer insulation. Keep in mind that while you are pulling the wire through, it might constantly rub one spot on an existing wire. It probably isnt bad in your case IVB where you are only pulling a couple of feet of wire, but it could be a bigger problem if you were pulling longer runs of wire.

I personally would do away with all the elbows and simply have straight conduit come out of the wall. This is obviously in a "non living space" so concealing the wires isn't of great importance on this side of the wall. Keep things simple man!

I personally would do away with all the elbows and simply have straight conduit come out of the wall. This is obviously in a "non living space" so concealing the wires isn't of great importance on this side of the wall. Keep things simple man!

Good call man, I used a crapload of the endless velcro to tie it up, looks much better than I thought. I put some MDF on the back so I could write down what does where for easy reference, plus make it look somewhat less than the 97 year old basement that it is.

I just re-ran the wiring today, plus I decided to run 6 new runs of cat5e as long as I was at it. I'll terminate it on the board tomorrow, so if there's any other suggestions let me know.

Thanks all, check it out:

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/newback.JPG

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/jring.JPG

Well, the rewiring took about as long as expected, ~3 days. Of course, the entire room rebuild beforehand plus the fact that i'm not yet done with half of it means the overall project isn't nearly done. I still need to build 2 interior walls so I can create a "room within a room", to both wallmount my new 35" rack, and put in a dehumidifier for the wet winter times.

Here's an "after" picture. It ended up taking me between 5-10mins PER RUN to cut it to look clean, plus I ended up redoing several runs as I realized a better way of doing it. I went the "no pain, no gain" route, and cut every wire to 6" within the exact length needed. I fed the spare back out and pushed the wiring back a bit, but this is now the "permanent" location for the Elk cabinet. I had a contigency plan beforehand where I left 2-3 feet of extra wiring there, that's gone now.

I also came up with an interesting idea about how to flatmount items that were too small for the Elk mounting plates: I used the dual-sided Elk sticky foam, and attached it to velcro. That way I can easily remove it to put wires in, and just reattach it back.

There's still a few odds & ends to clean up (like that damn wire hanging straight through on the right), but this is already staggeringly nicer than the disgusting mess I used to have.

http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/temp/cabinet_new.JPG