Building a new home and need tips on wiring for IR

[timmy]

Hey everyone, I'm a newb at this stuff so please forgive me

I am almost finished with framing my new home and want to start wiring everything up, I have most everything undercontrol and am using mainlobby as my interface system after much research.

What I'm looking to do is have my sat receievers in my media closet along with my dvd changer and reciever which will be controlled by mainlobby and or the sat reciever remote. My question is what is a good IR interface from the server to turn on the television itself and how do I attach the IR end to the TV. I know it will be pretty easy to have the server IR control everything in the media closet but turning on the tV itself is what I'm confused about. I've never used it before so I dont know. I've seen the stick on blasters but wouldnt that inhibit me from using my existing tv remote by blocking the ir sensor? Would it be best to put a blaster in the wall infront of the tv hi up? Reason I say that is I dont want to see a wire with tape on my TV's ir reciever

thank you everyone, I hope someone can help me make sense of this

 

[Steve]

First, Welcome to CocoonTech!

I think you are missing a piece. Yes, you can control the TV locally with the remote, but how will how change channels? Your IR system needs to be 2 way (send/receive) so you also need a receiver in each room. There are many types of receivers, from set top boxes to small round devices that you can mount in a small hole in a cabinet. You need a receiver in each room where you want to control the centralized equipment. These receivers will attach to a 'hub' and back to your server controller. That is for using the remote in each room and manually controlling the centralized equip. Now for the other direction, as you mentioned you can use the stick ons or blasters. I personally like the blasters better, as long as you don't have different pieces of equipment by the same manufacturer that would all respond to a signal. You can mount it in a cabinet to 'flood' it with IR, or across the room on an opposite wall with clear sight to equipment. You can build your own blaster, look here. There are also several other threads around that may help you, do a search on IR blaster or IR distribution and you will get several hits.

At the server end, direct serial control is the best option. Not sure if ML has drivers for the DirecTV boxes. If not then sticky emitters are probably best since you will likely have multiple similar receivers.

Good luck and keep posting ?'s

 

[bfisher]

Welcome aboard

You can have two way IR... run a Cat 5 wire for each IR receiver in each room. There are "leftover" wires in the Cat5 (if I remember right, IR receivers use 3 wires) that you can use for IR emitters where ever your receivers are. So the IR receivers are used to control the equipment in the closet, and the IR emitters are to allow the closet (MainLobby in your case) to control remote equipment. My HVPro can turn on or off any TV in the house (nice when in top bedroom and want to turn off kids TV in basement), change channels, etc by doing it this way. And I assume it's what you are looking for as well...

I've seen the stick on blasters but wouldnt that inhibit me from using my existing tv remote by blocking the ir sensor? Would it be best to put a blaster in the wall infront of the tv hi up? Reason I say that is I dont want to see a wire with tape on my TV's ir reciever

You can stick on IR emitters right over the IR receiver on your TV. They pass through any IR signals from your local remote control without issue. Generally they are at the bottom of the TV so you can easily stick on an emitter and pretty much hide it so you don't even notice it (I pulled the front bezel off mine and ran it inside on one TV, completely hidden).

If you do have an emitter on your TVs so your "closet" can control it, make sure you put the IR receiver in a position that it accurately knows when you control the TV locally (unless you power monitor the TV so you know when it's on). What you don't want is to turn on the TV with the remote, but not have ML see it so it thinks it's off when it's really on. (I overcame this by monitoring the AC power going to the TV. My HVPro can see when the TV is on this way and it's very accurate).

 

[DavidL]

Hi timmy,
Welcome to cocoontech and thank you for selecting MainLobby as your automation system core.

Yes, MainLobby does support some of the primary DirecTV sat receivers. Here is some documentation on that software plugin which has a supported model list
http://www.cinemaronlineforums.com/wiki/in...LDirecTV_Plugin

re: IR - the best IR tranceiver to use with MainLobby is Cinemar's own USBIR6. If you go to Cinemar's website, you should find info you need on what it is, what it costs, when to use it vs. some of the other supported IR transceivers (like USB_UIRT or GlobalCache). Note that right now the USBIR6 does not support 64 bit Operating systems, but we believe we have an update that should allow for this, but no promises since it isn't tested yet.