IVB's HA Progress

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. 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.

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. 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.

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:

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.

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.

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]

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.



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.

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.

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 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...