Crestron advice needed

1. Ebay links do not work here so cannot comment.

2. You will need software which is only available to dealers so unless the Ebay seller provides it you are SOL.

3. Yes, it really is that difficult and unless you are programming savvy I would not attempt it. I have NO problems with people that want to attempt it, just giving you an honest answer.

I'm programming my own Crestron system.
I have done quite a bit of programming in the past and have a pretty good concept of AV equipment:
-minor in computer science
-programmed Elan
-programmed RTI
-programmed Niles Intellicontrol
-programmed Philips Pronto

It has been 6 months since I moved in and I have just been able to get controllable sound out of my system a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure that it would have been much quicker if I worked on it full-time, but who can afford to take vacation just to program a system.

The processor you are looking at is an older series processor and touchscreen.
You still have to get the programming software, which is dealer-only, and there are no real tutorials, though there is some programming literature. Read the Simpl Primer, which is located on the Crestron website to get an idea of what was involved in the programming. Also, note that I got the concepts down in my first reading, it was the actual implementation that took so long.

CJ

I did my own and in record time (one year and about 18 failures) I know for sure there's one forum member here who got a good belly-laugh over my failure rate (you know who you are )but I finally got it and would not trade that experiance for anything. Well perhaps the clapp.
There's nothing quite like the experiance of walking into your home theater, pressing the master power button on a large touch screen and seeing everything come to life exactly the way you designed it to. One really nice feature about doing it your self is the ability to make changes on the fly.

Chip

I am a Crestron programmer and I can tell you that I wouldn't wish this learning curve on anyone. Without attending Crestron training courses and having access to Crestron's "True Blue Support" which is only for dealers, I would not attempt it.
I have been programming for a while now and it took me some trial and error to be able to program a bug free control system. After some rough experiences, I now am able to program a very robust system that really makes a "fool" proof system. Without a few years of experience and 40+ hours a week to program, I would recommend hiring someone.

This all sounds to me like an other reason that Crestron sucks. I'd never use a Cerstron system. Not only is it over priced, hostile to DOYs because the software utilities are not publicly available but they have this bizarre programming language you need to learn. I'd recommend MainLobby. I'm told it does everything Crstron can for 1/1000 the price and it does not require any programming. With it, you ought to have your system up and working in about 5 minutes.

What we use at work here are:

Crestron Pro2 Controller (also has ethernet connectivity for web based remote control)
ST-1700C Touch panel (it's 2 way for real feedback from rs232/422 devices)
RF gateways (again 2 way)

We have about 100 conference room systems from small to huge and these seem to do the job. If I was building a decent home system, I'd go this route.

audiblesolutions, not 1/1000 the price, but maybe 1/2. and not 5 minutes but out of the box type functionality in a day and fully customized in much less time than competing products.

But, I did get your jist.

Crestron is expensive, yes, but everything has a value. Calling Crestron, AMX or any other high-profile automation system "sucky" and overpriced is rather absurd. Very few automation systems can match the flexibility and reliablity of such systems. Having this kind of flexibility generally comes at the expense of increased complexity in setup, which is why a company like Crestron chooses not to cater to DIYers. Setup of Crestron hardware and software by its very nature is very complicated to the average consumer, and agreeing with a previous post in this thread, it's not a task I would wish on any non-saavy consumer.

Sure, you can spend $99 and get a copy of MainLobby, a Windows PC and a few UMPC touch panels and go to town. This is a totally different business model that DOES openly cater to DIYers.

The point here is that with Crestron, you're buying a complete, implemented solution, not just a bunch of ugly black boxes. Some people are willing to pay for that luxury and piece of mind, some are not. No one is forcing you to buy Crestron.


sumwunls,

If control of a single-room home theater system is all you're after, advanced automation equipment might be overkill in your case. I would also consider standlone remote systems like Pronto, URC, Harmony, RTI, etc.

chunkisagoonie,

Alan happens to be an advanced Crestron programmer. Unfortunately unless someone follows the posts here it would be hard to tell he was being sarcastic. He was mocking the statements that are often made by the unknowing here.

hehe...that would be me the so called unknowning Just to clarify again I still believe Crestron is WAY overpriced.

To the OP, unless you see yourself maybe taking the step to be a CI with Crestron I just dont think this is a wise choice since there are so many other flexible and easier value options to do DIY home automation. (CQC or MainLobby).

It is irresponsible posts like this which make life on DIY'ers unecessarily hard, and makes life on the honest software manufacturers like CQC difficult as they get painted with the same snake oil salesman brush as you.

Is MainLobby magic software? Will it address the IDE issues I had 3 days ago? How about the fact that after a power outage, my DirecTV box no longer wants to accept serial commands? Or perhaps that the motherboard i've got is very picky in terms of PCI slots and cards?

For those of you who have attended one of my "Intro to HA" webinars, remember when I said that of the 1000 hours i'd have to spend building out a complete smart home if I was starting over, the GUI would represent somewhere between 10-100 hours? That's what DavidL/Smoothtlk is referring to.

I've said it before and i'll say it again - Don't believe the Hype. DIY HA using software engines, windows PCs, and plug-n-pray hardware will take some elbow grease, and there is no escaping that. You get massive customization capability, but at the cost of significant work effort.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something and nothing less.

I'm so gullible sometimes

That is an interesting time allocation. I find that drawing or customizing GUIs and writing the associated code for them is what takes the most time. If you are using a 14" touch panel or web tablet it's no big deal. When move down to 4-6" touch panels it becomes more intersting, in terms of exiting out features or distilling the essential features for that device and then writing the code for it. It is true that I have to deal with panels from 4.6" to 17" diagnals, some 4:3 or 800x600 and some wide screen or 1368x768. That's a ton of Photoshop work to make everyting look right. When you are combining small and large panels, including global control on some but not others developing the UI over a variety of panels can take a fair amount of time. I think 100 hours might be insufficient for a first timer with little or no experience to hit upon the right solutons for his system.

Driver creation can be fairly quick. I can take most protocols and have a 1 way driver in less than 60 minutes and a 2 way driver in a few days. Feedback is a pain largely because it is rarely in the form that is 100% dependable and secondly there are often strange timing issues that need to be taken into account and that only gets worked out with trial and error. The more feedback the longer it takes for the driver.

CD servers and security systems can take a while to work out, especially the latter as they are notorious for not being all they appear at first sight.

Having once looked at your screen shots my biggest problem is that your GUIs were coded for power users. I try to code mine for the basic user, while letting the power user have more control but forcing him to work a little harder. I find it hard to believe that even a graphic artist could generate the graphics in less than 30 hours and few graphic artists in my experience understand touch panels or UI's. I'd think you'd need at least 100 hours and perhaps more time to develop a userable UI for the basic user that satisfies the power user--and anyone participating on this board is apt to be a power user.

Every system and languge has its quirks. I cannot speak for CQC or the other DIY solutions since I have not played with them. Crestron certainly has its quirks. In the old days you had to trigger a DELAY with a one shot to make it work. Why? Becuase. You need to manage the amount of data going over Crestnet. But I'll also suggest that these past 2 weeks, I've been spending rediculous amounts of time coding systems. Identical code worked in one system while the second required me to rewrite the entire lighting logic. Since I perform a spectrum analysis of the RF in that enviorment before deciding on what wireless frequancies to assign all wireless devices all I can say is that you are apt to run into quite a few unforseen stumbling blocks.

There is most certainly a satisfaction from seeing the code you've written work. There is some satisfation in being able to design the UI as you see fit, not as some else thinks you should or is able to code for it. Still assigning only 10% of ones time to the UI seems low to me. My experience is that 30-40% of my time is UI related. It does matter that I program for a number of different firms whose salesman foolishly sell features that require--sometimes endless--editing or redrawing of my UI. It also does not help me that I code the way I feel something should work and not the fastest method that gets me out of the job. Lighting for example, I don't hard code the logic but let the scenes be programmed in run time ( with defaults built in so the logic will work out of the box. ) That requires a lot of dumb data entry as every system is different. There will be fewer or more loads in any job. I also made the time consuming and possibly foolish decsion not to code in the fastest way, by using numbers ( zone 1, lts_f1_r1) but by using room or zone names. That increases my data entry, often by a factors of 10. Still, the UI is the single most time consuming part of my job. If I could only standardize it for every job and every client I could lower my programming time by at least 30%.

But maybe I'm not as smart as some others and make up in effort what I lack above the shoulders. Or I still provide custom solutions whereas more successful institutions provide repeatable solutions.

Alan

True, allow me to further explain. I'm differentiating between presentation layer and logic, in order to have an apples-apples comparison with other software packages. I'm not sure, but wondering if you're talking about both.

You could spend until the end of time working on GUIs. But if you're content with one of the template styles available with CQC (ie mine), you could customize the whole kit&kaboodle to your equipment inside of 100 hours. You'd have 800x600 screens, with my look&feel, but you'd have damn near everything I have. Also note that we diverge in that you'd have a repeated solution there.

It is where you want custom logic & coding that starts sucking up time. But that's not in the 100 hour bucket, I have a different 100 hour bucket for that, plus I have a "time doubler cuz you are a newbie" in there. But the point remains that 10% of the overall effort is on the presentation layer, which is all that DavidL/SmoothTlk is referring to above. No way could even he claim that you'd have custom logic done inside of a day.

"It is irresponsible posts like this which make life on DIY'ers unecessarily hard, and makes life on the honest software manufacturers like CQC difficult as they get painted with the same snake oil salesman brush as you.

Is MainLobby magic software? Will it address the IDE issues I had 3 days ago? How about the fact that after a power outage, my DirecTV box no longer wants to accept serial commands? Or perhaps that the motherboard i've got is very picky in terms of PCI slots and cards?

For those of you who have attended one of my "Intro to HA" webinars, remember when I said that of the 1000 hours i'd have to spend building out a complete smart home if I was starting over, the GUI would represent somewhere between 10-100 hours? That's what DavidL/Smoothtlk is referring to.

I've said it before and i'll say it again - Don't believe the Hype. DIY HA using software engines, windows PCs, and plug-n-pray hardware will take some elbow grease, and there is no escaping that. You get massive customization capability, but at the cost of significant work effort.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something and nothing less.
"

What are you talking about?

Truth in Advertising.

And where is it not true?

In your case it's easy to tell. When your lips are moving.

QQQ, and the supported facts? Beyond the attempt at humor?

You're setting expectations to DIY'ers that by using your software they'll be able to get everything up & running in a day, when in reality it's much more and you're only talking about a thin slice of the overall effort.

And what isn't true about that?
Cinemar customers can get their basic needs met of the out of the box software working in a few hours. By basic, I mean ability to play a movie or music or support of their XM radio or Weather display. From there it can take days to months to customize to next levels that are supported by the product, but outside the scope of Out of the Box functionality.

You do not represent "most" Cinemar customers. Your setup is highly customized and covers more ground than most any users. Most users want to do basic things like covered above. Some go farther, some treat HA as a hobby (as you apparantly do) and don't consider time as a cost.

I give up. Uncle. Mercy. You're just not getting what all the various tasks are in setting up a system, and I don't mean just the software bits. Perhaps you're not intentionally misleading DIY'ers, perhaps it's much worse - you don't even get how small a piece of the pie you're talking about. Even just XM or Weather or ...

In the end, it's pretty much clear to me that Cinemar's entire view of HA is a cute little single PC system that isn't hooked up to anything, and you've obviously never worked on anything bigger than that, because otherwise you'd realize what it actually takes to do anything more than that.

For the lurkers, if all you want is the Weather, don't even bother with commercial software - just stick with weather.com's "weather on your desktop". Does the same thing, almost a pushbutton install. That you can do in a few hours.

For anything bigger than that, think strong and hard about who you're going to go with - my advice would be to go with someone with an appreciation of what it is you're about to go through, and who can guide you with all of it.

IVB, my personal system has most of the advanced features that you read about in magazines and in forums. It is all implemented in MainLobby and the partner integrations.
From casual looks at your system, I am doing all that you are doing with exception of PVR, because I use DirecTivos (which I have serial control of via TVLobby).

In another post you said you did "two year extensive evaluation of MainLobby" and are that uninformed? You say that you surf the Cinemar website all the time and haven't seen users posts of what they are doing? You haven't looked at the list of supported hardware and viewed Cinemar / User contributed scenes that demonstrate what they are using ML for?

"if all you want is the Weather, don't even bother with commercial software - just stick with weather.com's "weather on your desktop". Does the same thing, almost a pushbutton install. That you can do in a few hours.
"
Obviously you don't do too much with weather yourself. In my case, I use the weather to interact with my Irrigation system. Something you can't do by putting a website on your desktop.

Ok, what other items do you need covered so we can get back to the HA topics at hand?

So David, your system took one day to setup? All of your devices, all of your functionality is ready to go out of the box? Run the installer and it all works?

IVB's point, which I think everyone here gets except you (and I know you really do get it, but just can't say it) is that ANY system will take a pretty significant time commitment. Not one day, not one week. You constantly lowball the time commitment it takes to set up a complex system. You seem to be intentionally deceptive, maybe IVB is right and you just don't know, but it sure seems like you should know.

EVERY system available will take a significant time commitment to set up properly. Whether DIY or dealer installed.

All we are trying to say is that you telling people that Main Lobby can be setup in a day for a reasonably complex system is more of your sales BS. It may very well be able to do all the things you claim, but it will take someone more than an afternoon to do them.

And by the way, why are you posting ANYTHING in this particular thread. You claim to only bring up Main Lobby when it is appropriate. The OP made no mention, nor asked about any other system than the specific Crestron gear in the first post. Please keep your shilling to a minimum.

fletch999,
If you go to my first post in this thread, it was in response to a post that referenced MainLobby that pretty obviously was intended for me. The rest of the posts (including yours) steered the conversation more off topic from the OP.

There is no attempt to decieve. What the CQC advocates are not understanding (maybe because it's not supported in CQC) is out of the box capability. Multizone audio, mulitzone video, weather, xm support, iPod support, irrigation, horoscope, and very soon lighting are all supported with just software installation and some configuration that takes a few hours. This is just the software end of the install. The hardware can take days or months depending on the individual setup.
I know this is the case because we build servers that do the above in a few hours to do just that. For that matter, you can buy a server and a UMPC and plug them in, network them together and it all works literally out of the box. Just plug in your speakers and video display device.

Any changes from out of the box takes minutes to months (which I have posted before all of the above in response to the CQC advocates). We are hoping to take this down to literally minutes in install time. It has taken many months of development to get the install down to what it is, and a few more to take it to the next level of simplicity.

Why doesn't anybody from CQC say "prove it" instead of just creating negative comments?

IVB is an interesting guy. I would say his experience mirrors my own as a professional and it is the reason I often come to the conclusion that for the great bulk of the public, even among participants here, hiring a pro is often a better choice. The source code is but one aspect in the puzzle. Inter-system operation and communication, hardware issues ( such as the IDE board problem and the PCI card preferences of the mother board IVB mentioned ) touch panels that fail to communicate or worse fail.

In the best of all possible worlds you have a perfectly closed, wired system and then you can, generally get things up and running quickly. As soon as you open the system you add complexity and make the likelihood that the installation will proceed with a minority of issues less likely. Even installing UPB lighting switches is likely to take longer than our friend from Cinemar suggests. And if you go with a better lighting system it could add still more time. What if you are sending the code and your Global Cache unit is sending the IR code--the IR code everyone in chat rooms is telling you works in their system but it's not in yours? What if you need a driver that the folks in Massachusetts haven't the time to develop for you and no one else in the chatisphere will write it for you? ( Are not Redsox fans more optimistic than most forms of humanity? ) How long to run those network cables from point A to points B, C and D? Security cameras? Audio wiring? Component video wiring or are you intending to stream data all the way to the display and break it out with an X-Box media converter?

Alan

Alan, no disagreement with all of the "what ifs" that you relate to. That is NOT the scope of what I am talking about. I am talking about an out of the box solution much like MCE2005 is an out of the box solution. I am NOT talking about a custom install in a few hours. I am not talking about hardware that breaks or has IRQ issues or running of cables. I am only talking about the software portion of the install.

For playing of multi zone music, of playing hard drive based movies, weather lookup, horoscope lookup, callerID (with phone connection), and the other out of the box configured applications, this is not a significant software configuration to get things working in a very nice way. Typically, getting to just this point takes many many hours with customizable competitive solutions. Lighting is our next challenge to make this simple, and we have the major pieces of that already with our "Lighting Device Family Manager" and prebuilt scenes that are coded to talk to the Lighting device family manager software. One goes into the LDFM and adds their UPB controller and puts the UPB device codes to correspond with the presetup lighting catagories and you can then control that light from MainLobby. If you have Insteon or Z-Wave, just change the hardware driver, edit the device IDs appropriately and those then work like UPB just did. My guess is to get a dozen common area lights working would take a couple of hours of SOFTWARE configuration. Obviously installing the light switches will take much longer. Debugging might be easy or difficult.

With non customizable solutions, this doesn't take long.
Meedio (YahooTV), MCE2005, and others in my mind fits this catagory. These take even less time than a ML base install so, it's not incomprehensible that this is possible.

I also agree with you that for an end to end solution (design, sourcing, installation, debugging, software configuration, testing, locking down, and maintenance) SHOULD be done by a Pro for most installations.

OK, multiple posts essentially saying the same thing so that should cover it unless there are new questions or insights.

It's far OT, but given that all the comments are in this thread i'll keep it here.


So it's easy to do but no one does it? Huh?

I've been begging you to prove it for months. But not you - I want to see one of your customers come on these forums and describe their entire system, how they did it, and how hard it was. I want the complete open & honest truth, just as I constantly discuss my difficulties & issues on my "Progress" thread. I want webinars walking me through this just as I regularly educate your people on how to setup their Cinemar systems.

After all, if it really was the pushbutton setup you describe, you should have just as many users doing *everything* and happy to post about it. And they should be saving so much dang time with your ease of setup that they have nothing else to do but eat bonbons and watch American Idol all day.

I wouldn't think you'd have a problem producing that - CQC has a dozen or so who actively post on all the forums about their issues/etc (we have 80 different threads this year alone in our user systems forum). That's especially impressive given that with CQC it's so gosh darn hard, you need a freakin PhD to do it all, plus roughly 4 million years in training, and we only have perhaps 1.5 dealers in the known universe.

Don't bother letting me know when that user gets here - i'll know when they start their own thread and regular discuss this with us.