Complex home automation...

I have everything you're looking at doing, we built about 4 years ago and about 3 months ago our basement was finished into a home theater / bar / gameroom / additional living area.


Home Automation: Use the JDS stargate for the backbone and Homeseer as the web interface and audrey touch screen controller.


Touchscreens: 3 Com Audreys and JDS LCD keypads


Lighting Control - Smarthome X10 true rocker switches


Security - Stargate / Caddx Panel


Whole house Audio - Using Niles distribution products with keypad controls.


Video Distribution - RG6 patch panel with Motorola signal boosters. CCTV Camera broadcast through modulators.


HTPC - Two systems - one in living room and one in home theater.


I'm starting to document my setup for others that are looking for solutions on my website.. Feel free to check it out and let me know if you have any questions.

Q, that was a very nice recommendation.


DEAN you forgot to tell him the following very important company statement, which incidentally, I think should be posted on your website front page:


"Crestron and AMX make outstanding products. If you are interested in looking at some alternatives, I'd like to suggest that you take a look at my companies products (insert web site here). Our company is striving to offer a scalable and flexible automation solution that is based on a powerful open software architecture. Our software can accommodate systems as small as one room in conjunction with a handheld remote control or as large as multi-building estates with full fledged touchscreens throughout. Some here may warn you that we are a new company and that is true. But our size can also be a benefit and we will work directly with you to make sure your system performs exactly as you need it to. Again, AMX and Crestron make outstanding products, and we are not trying to replace them, but rather offer an alternative for people that would like to explore a powerful system based on an open software architecture"

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Not due to lack of my trying It's kind of amazing that I can be damned as a degenerate spammer sometimes, but many people who are very much into HA can still not have heard about it. Oh well, one soul at a time as they say...


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It's not new, but it's just been difficult to make people aware of it. It went 1.0 about 14 months ago, but the underlying software technology has been in development for over a decade, so from a software architecture point of view it is quite mature and built on a hugely powerful proprietary code base. It still has some growing to do in terms of automation features, but the remaining holes are being plugged pretty rapidly.


We lean more in the Crestron direction than in the Homeseer direction, roughly speaking, in that we are trying to target the custom installation market, though we currently still mostly sell into the high end of the DIY market because custom installers are a conservative crowd and they kind of want to see the product prove itself first.


Anyway, don't get me started Take a look at the web site, which has a lot of documentation, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

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I did a search on a couple of the sites I frequent and found some postings from you, so it does appear you're getting the word out in the community.


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The DIY community and Creston are somewhat opposite of one another. The DIY community looks for solutions that are identical or superior to the Creston solutions at a fraction of the price. Those solutions of course have the drawback of sometimes not being as reliable and can be more cumbersome to come up with. While one buys a Creston for ease and reliability, but this would be put in by the installer.


I guess a good analogy would be the Phillips Pronto Remote. It's a pain to program, but has an extremely attractive interface and is easy to use if you spend the time configuring it.


Thanks for enlightening me, and I'll do my part to spread the word once I check it out.

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Our product is quite inexpensive, even including the hardware, so if you are a DIY type looking to do the setup yourself, it is a very cost effective solution (since you aren't paying someone else to do it for you.) But, when I said we were leaning more in the Crestron direction above, I mean more along the line of how the product is structured and the market we are trying (over time) to move into, which dictates a lot of how the product is structured.

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In part, he and I are making a distinction between the flexiblity of the product architecture, and the number of devices it supports. CQC is very flexible in terms of its architecture, being completely network distributed from the ground up and based on very modern distributed object technologies.


It doesn't support as many devices as Homeseer yet, partly because it's just not been around as long, and also partly because we cannot compromise our rock solid stability, because that is a ground level requirement in the market we want to target. So, though we do support third parties doing device support, we follow those efforts very closely and ensure the quality of those drivers, and we won't ship them unless they are high quality.


Homeseer's target market, which is probably more the hardcore DIY market, is probably happy to make the trade off for having wide device support, but the quality of any given plugin can vary widely (and this is something that I've heard from many Homeseer users, so I'm assuming it is correct but I don't use it myself so perhaps it's not true.) Our target market holds most fundamentally that 24x7 reliability is the most important thing of all. So we have to accept a slower growth of device support (and do more of it ourselves) in order to insure that reliability.


As you say, they are different markets, and we both have made our choices to suit the market we are targeting. As I said, we do sell into the DIY market now, but in the 'upper end' of that market, where folks are doing it themselves, and though highly technical they are not automation hobbyists, and really expect rock solid stability of the end product.

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I do. The hardware solutions running any form of Windows are included in my list of unstable devices when compared to those that don't. Certainly, a stripped down box running XP or 2000 can be extremely reliable and my Windows 2003 server that controls my Camera DVR software and website has been the best I've seen in terms of reliability. However, my JDS Stargate (or similar) has proven to be more stable and does not require additional security and antivirus updates.


I agree with the plug-in statement. I do have occasional issues with plug-in's such as the Audrey plug-in, but for what it does, I live with it!


Regardless of the reason, Windows is less stable than a dedicated hardware solution not running windows (or even linux), but it's own embedded code. If my radio dies in my car, and it for some reason restricts the ability of my car to travel over 5 mph, wouldn't it be an issue with the design of that car? Does that mean I don't use a combination of both? Of course not, we've all learned to live with the occasional errors, memory leaks and blue screens.


Sorry to the OP that it's gone off topic a bit, but after looking more into CQC, I agree it is a product to at least check out.