[negativesir]

This is my first post here in the AVS forum. For the last couple of years I have been working on the A/V system at my house. My cousin taught me everything I know. It has been quite a learning experience. When I purchased the house, we remodelled it. During the remodel, we reran all the wires and everything needed for a killer sound system. That got me started for the living room at least. And little by little I have been expanding it to the other rooms. Anyways, I am nearly done and the system is under going its final upgrade. So I thought I would share with you my setup. Everything I have installed and put together myself except where I needed a second person to help.


Here is the living room. We have 5 speaker crafts, in ceiling. My cousin helped me cut these speakers in. Every thing in this house is like 3 times more difficult to do than in a normal house because of its age. The ceiling and all the walls are plaster. And there are two layers of plaster with chicken wire between them. So we had to get a roto zip to cut through the dry wall and the chicken wire. It is messy.




More pictures of the in ceiling speakers. We had also cut in these can lights. There are four of them and they are surrounded by the 5 speakers.






All the equipment is housed in a closet. All the ethernet from every room and all the coax all come here. The DirecTV satellite also gets fed in here. The gigabit switch is velcro mounted to the wall.




Recently I added Cool Components VS-HFS-WB vent system to move the hot air out.




It vents out into the adjacent vented closet, where the security system is. This weekend I installed the VS-HFS-WB and I had to move all these security panels like 8 inches lower to where they are now to make room for the vent.




The equipment is housed in a Middle Atlantic rack which is not finished. This is my first rack. Before I had Sanus shelf system. I am very happy with Middle Atlantic and the product they put out. It was the right move for where my system was headed.




And you can see the back, the wire management is not yet done, the top lace bar is just chilling. I am still waiting on a couple other things before I finish up the back. Once I have the wire management done, and everything zip tied I will better pictures of it. Everything is controlled through Control4 HC-300.






Master bedroom with another TV and 5 speaker craft in ceiling.




Guest bedroom. This one has the older TV and only 2 in ceiling speakers.




Outside security cameras. He is just one of them. They are monoprice.




Happy that I can share this. I usually don't let people into my house.

 

[negativesir]

Here is a picture of all the devices I have controlled through Control4. So through the remote control I can control the lights or temperature in any of the rooms and switch between the different sources.




And here is a list of all the devices in the rack:


Defender Security DVR

Control 4 HC300-B

Linksys Cable Modem

DLink DIR-615

Netgear Gigabit Switch

Sonos Zone Player

Synology NAS

Denon AVR-3312CI

Denon AVR-3311CI

Monoprice HDMI Matrix 4x4

Xbox 360 Black

Xbox 360 Black

DIRECTV-HR24-500

DIRECTV-HR24-500


These are the TVs I have throughout the house:


Samsung 51” Plasma 1080p 600Hz / 3D HTV

Samsung LCD 46"

Samsung Plasma 58"


Subwoofer in the living room:


Bowers and Williams subwoofer Asw610

 

[negativesir]

A better picture of the front of the rack. As you can see, I purchased the Middle Atlantic SLIM-5 because nothing else would have fit in that size of closet.




I have two almost identical of DirecTV, XBox 360, and Denon Receiver. Power in the rack is Middle Atlantic 1U.




I don't really own an expensive camera so these were all taken from my camera phone.

 

[negativesir]

This is the visio rack diagram I mocked up before I started work on it. As the work progressed, I had to change a few things, but this is the final layout.

 

[negativesir]

For the security system, I really looked around on Amazon and every where I could find for a good Security DVR. But almost all the receivers on Amazon had unfavorable ratings in one form or another. But I found this company called Defender and it looked like they made a good quality product. All four bullet cameras are from monoprice. I have two that were like 60$ and two that were 80$. I used the baluns from monoprice and ran CAT5 in the attic.



The DVR I got from Defender supports 8 channels, so I plan on adding another four cameras at some point. It is all controllable via the the local intranet and the screenshot above is from the device's web server.


Whenever the DVR detects motion, it will send an e-mail to me with a picture:

 

[negativesir]

Picture of the subwoofer:




And complete picture of the living room:

 

[GusGus748s]

Nice work. We are planning in buying a house at the end of the year. I am hoping to building something similar to your set up.

 

[cavalier240]

Did you do the Control4 programming yourself?

 

[Unacceptable]

Fellow programmer here. Not theater related, but how did you handle power at the cameras if you were using baluns? This has been on my to-do list for two years and my plan for power has always been to use POE.


Of course, I then remember that this project will require me crawling through the attic and climbing a 20 ft ladder and it ALWAYS drops off the list again.

 

[negativesir]

Yes I did the Control4 programming myself.


As for the security baluns, I used monoprice baluns that are Video/Power over CAT5. I think doing POE only makes sense if your security cameras are web enabled. I have a security DVR that is already web enabled, so there is no need to have each camera web-enabled also.




Then to power the baluns I used this power adapter and splitter cable from amazon. Since I had four cameras I needed 4A so I got that power adapter along with the 4 splitter cable.





I am not finished 100% with the security stuff, I just got my panamax UPS and will be hooking up the security DVR to it so that if the power goes out, the security DVR will continue to record. If you are using POE, then you would want to connect the POE router/switch to a UPS + a security DVR if you are using one.


Going in the attic sucks. Took all day and I had help fishing wires because all the security cameras were in the hardest spots to reach in the attic, like where the roof slopes down to zero.