IVB's HA Progress - Page 3

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, 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....

Just started a thread on alarmrelay over on cocoon

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.


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]


Then we get truly dramatic.
To load this page took 79 seconds. I believe this page is about 125K.


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.


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

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 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, 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!

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.

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:

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.