Colossus, The Forbin Project

[asteinmetz]

Here's where I'll log my progress.

First a big thanks to the CocoonTech members for all the help so far! With your guidance I've selected my wiring, security, HVAC, lighting and my AV. As of this writing most of the gear is installed and working on a standalone basis. This is for a bigger new home attached to small old home we are going to use as the in-law apartment. We expect the CO next week.

I named this thread after a 70's TV movie where the American and Russian strategic defense computers start talking to each other (as you can guess things don't work out well for the humans). My challenge now is to get all my gear talking to each other. Hopefully it will work out better for us. As of now I have not settled on a master HA application. I'll talk about what does what later but I figured some "money shots" would be more fun to start out.

Here's the wiring closet, minus the closet. There are four areas. The equipment rack is on the left. It has, from top to bottom:

Thecus 1u4500 NAS
Dell Poweredge 1650 server (cheapo used from e-bay)
Dell Poweredge 1750 server (cheapo used from e-bay)
TrippLite Power Strip
Universal Remote MSC-400 RF to IR Receiver (paired with two MX-900 remotes)
Verizon FIOS STB (Motorola)
Tivo HD with two cable cards
Cyberview 13" pull-out LCD monitor
Cyberview pull-out LCD keyboard (cheapo generic stuff from e-bay)
Speakercraft Amp
Devon AVR-3808CI A/V receiver

In the middle is the patch panel with:
Verizon (ActionTec?) router on top.
Coax Patch Bay
Cat5e 48 Patch Bay for General IP Stuff, A/V baluns, phone
Cat5e 24 Patch Bay for IP cameras
Netgear 24-port switch (to be installed)
Netgear 16-port POE switch
Speakercraft Audio distribution switches

Check out the ganglium (? - barely remembered from biology) of cable overhead. That's a lot of copper!

On the right are three Elk cans. Zone extenders, ethernet module, the stat control (to be installed) and power distribution are in the top can. The Elk itself is in the middle and the power supply and backup for the smokes, etc, are below.

Sandwiched between the patch panel and the Elk cans is the Aprilaire thermostat distribution panel.

At the bottom is the FIOS hardware including the battery backup.

Next up is the Toshiba 52" XF550 LCD TV above the family room fireplace.

And, finally, the ELK TS07 touchpad in the MBR showing the front door camera. The camera is a Panasonic BL-C10a. I am experimenting with Panasonic and Axis cams.

Now comes the fun part; getting this Tinkertoy Ferris Wheel to look like the picture on the box!

-- Art

 

[asteinmetz]

Verizon FIOS install headaches.

We are not big TV people. TCM and Simpsons reruns are about it. We do rent a lot of Netflix movies and the little guy is getting into "Blue's Clues." Consequently, I have made do with basic analog cable for years. No set top box. We also use our cell phones in lieu of landlines so I just have lifeline service from Verzion at $15/mo, all in.

I had a 2-year contract with my local cable company, Patriot Media, that included broadband at $25/mo. When Patriot media was sold to Comcast this spring it was an opportunity to look around. They jacked up my internet cost to $30/mo so I am assuming the contract is void and they won't try to stick me with an early termination fee. Verizon FIOS came in at $10/mo more than my total costs before and it is purportedly fast than the cable modem, includes a zillion channels and unlimted calling. Since Comcast is showing more than the expected contempt for customer these days by throttling internet traffic and overcompressing their HD channels (documented elsewhere), I figured it was time for a change.

So I call Verizon and schedule a May 13 install. The guy shows up on time but says "Hmm, I do the equipment but the cable is already supposed to be laid before I come." About this time the cable trench digging guy comes sauntering up. They have a chat and the cable laying guy takes off. The tech installs the boxes in the basement but I need to wait for the cable to get laid. A couple days later. I call Verizon to see what's up and the guy (who I reached after the usual 20 minutes of VRU handoffs) says "Hmmm. I show the job as incomplete but it doesn't say why or have anything scheduled." So I schedule another visit and this time the guy says, "oh, we don't need to dig anything the cable has been snaked through the existing conduit. To bad they didn't leave enough cable, I have to get my splicing gear." So that slows things down. After a couple more hours they are ready to set up the equipment except for the fact that the fiber is still dark. "Hmm," says the guy. "The pole they say I'm supposed to hook to is a mile down the road." Changing the hub requires an engineer and I have to wait the weekend before one is around. To Verizon's credit, the second tech said he would call me with progress updates and he did.

Three days later we are all hooked up. Three weeks and three truck rolls after the initial install date. The Tivo is still not working with it's dual cable cards, but I haven't got around to playing with it yet. The Verizon guy had never done a Tivo install, of course.

The internet took a while to bring up. I had to call tech support which correctly diagnosed I had manually entered differnent domain name server address than the one their router supplies. Further I have a lot of static IP address that are on a different subnet than the default verizon router subnet, so I had to change the subnet in the router config. No password for the router was supplied so I had to do a hardware reset of the router and get tech support to tell me the default password. Again, kudos to Verizon for having a guy on the phone who was clueful.

Overall, the process was more work, more days off work for me and more cost to Verizon that it ought to be but it's done. Now to program the remotes!

 

[ctay]

Looks great! Let us know how that TS07 works out for you! I bought one but I'm not sure it is going to work with what I want it to do...

 

[electron]

Love those progress reports, keep em coming!

ctay; what are you trying to accomplish with your TS07? I have one since the day they came out, so I might be able to help out out.

 

[beelzerob]

Art, where'd you get your coax and cat5 patch bays from? I'm going to need some of those right quick, and so I better start looking around.

 

[asteinmetz]

Them or Me? Who installs what?

I didn't buy the patch panels myself, an installer did. I did buy the equipment rack from starcase.com and the cable from cables4u.com. This brings me to another issue I grappled with when planning my install. How DIY do I want to be. My goals are

1) To have a state of the art integrated HA system.
2) Have fun putting it together.
3) High WAF.

Having fun is important but saving money was not an explicit goal (though I am cheap). Consequently I decided what would be fun to do and what wouldn't. First of all, running wires and terminating them is not fun; at least not for the quantity I have. The cores of the system so far are the Elk M1G, some TVs and a receiver, Aprilaire 8870 T-stats, and Leviton Vizia RF switches. I had installers for each of these cores. I bought just about everything myself BUT the patch panels and cans. They had instructions to get minimum functionality so the house worked when they left and I would do all customization. Ideally, the installers didn't have to know about any of the HA aspects. So, the electrician just had to install the switches. They do their jobs without any automation controller involved (albeit expensively). Same thing is true for the T-stats. The Elk installer left me with a functioning alarm system with one keypad. Glad I didn't have to install all those reed switches but bringing the touch panel on line and talking to the Elk was sure fun! The interfaces to other systems, alarm companies, ethernet, touchpanel, stats, etc, are my job. The TV turned on, but (as the FIOS install was late) that was it. The house works well enough that I can approach my HA stuff as time permits, rather than being under pressure to get the heat or light or internet or TV on.

 

[asteinmetz]

Looks great! Let us know how that TS07 works out for you! I bought one but I'm not sure it is going to work with what I want it to do...

I like it but it is a, slow, overpriced, WindowsCE tablet PC. Latency is low with the Elk and my security cameras but it C - R - A - W - L - S to load external web links like the weather. I expect to get different touch screen solutions elsewhere in the house but I wanted the MBR panel to "just work" so I went with the sanctioned product.

 

[asteinmetz]

Thermostat mystery. Audio Joy. Doorbell awkwardness.

I have six Aprilaire 8870 stats. All work fine on a standalone basis. So now I have to get them talking to the Elk (and whatever future HA controller I use). I have the distribution panel and protocol adapter wired in. The protocol adapter converts the RS485 to RS232 that the elk serial interface uses. I hooked them up to the elk per the elk instructions and got nuthin'. So I take a step back and use the Aprilaire hookup instructions which tell you to get a dumb terminal talking to the 'stats before hooking it up further. I plug the RS232 cable from the adapter into my trusty Linux box and fire up gtkterm. I use the default protocol spec of 8N1, Echo on, at 9600 BAUD (remember when that was a FAST modem?). Nuthin'. The docs say I should see the RS232 RX and RS485 TX lights flash when I type in the terminal window. Nope. There is one tantalizing clue. When I send a <BREAK> to the adapter the appropriate lights do flash, so the adapter isn't quite deaf. I'll ask for help in a forum here and see if anything turns up. The Aprilaire docs say "consult a computer professional" if things don't go well. The "Geek Squad" could solve this, I'm sure. Thanks.

The TV stuff is working reasonably well in the living room. The wife and mother-in-law have no problem getting "Blue's Clues" out of the Tivo downstairs onto the TV and the ceiling speakers..and turning it off. So far, the WAF is high. I still haven't gotten around to the bedroom TV. I've been working on getting the MX-900 RF/IR remote to control the whole-house audio. I have a single zone with manual volume controls in each room. My A/V receiver, Denon AVR 3808CI, has 3 zones so I have the HDMI going out of zone1 (the only possible choice) and the audio out to zone3 (which can only be audio). Zone2 can do audio and video but composite video only.

Designing the control flow to do all possible configurations is mind bending. My two video sources are the Verizon STB and the Tivo. My audio sources are the two TV boxes plus the Netradio function of the Denon and my Logitech Squeezebox which is plugged into the CD input on the Denon. To get any WAF at all the remote has to be task-centric. She can't be bothered with jumping around to each device (and neither can I). She wants to "listen to jazz in the kitchen. Give me a button that will do that."

I am a long way from done with that design ideal but I got a cool thing working today. I had two Logitech Squeezboxes in the old house. I put one of them in the kitchen with no amp or speakers and the other downstairs, plugged into the Denon. You can synchronize one player to another (they are all on the LAN) so I use the kitchen squeezebox as the display head and IR receiver for the downstairs one which pumps through to the ceiling speakers. I works like a charm! We have an open plan downstairs so the family room and the kitchen have unbroken lines-of-sight to allow the IR for the TV or Squeezebox. Logitech now offers a WiFi remote for a headless SB but that couldn't control the amp, so what's the point?

I want to wire the doorbells into the elk so I had the installer drop all the doorbell wires to the wiring closet. The security system has several spare zones so hooking them up should be EZ. Wait a minute. The spare zones are on the zone expanders that are in the attic. The installer saved himself some trouble by locating two of the zone expanders in the attic, and ran the upstairs sensors there. This way only the zone expander wiring needs to run to the basement. Makes sense but now my doorbell wires are in the basement. Doh!

That's all for now. Good luck and thanks for all the fish!

 

[asteinmetz]

--- Doorbell doing what I tell it to do, not what I want -- Finally, a winner for HA controller. -- the lights go on and off --

It's starting to come together now. The doorbell is now saying "Beep, beep, Front Door Bell"and "Beep, Back Door Bell" in that awful Elk voice. The beeps are not so great either. A sonorous chime would be nice. The only facility the Elk has for getting your own sounds into it, is to record it through the phone input. Clunky. The ability to upload of a sound file is an obvious omission. I found one spare zone and one dead zone in the can downstairs where the doorbell wires ran to. The dead zone arose from the drywall guys slicing one of wires for a bedroom window sensor. Rather than rip out the drywall to find the break, we put a wireless sensor in since we already had a wireless zone expander for the old part of the house. Hooking them up was a fun exercise since I learned about the difference between supervised and unsupervised inputs. I erroneously thought all Elk inputs had to be supervised until I saw that you can describe the a zone's "normal" state to be "always open" in the ElkRP software. So one is supervised and the other doorbell is not. Both work. As a practical matter, though, we can't hear the doorbell in many parts of the house. There is just one speaker in the upstairs foyer. When an alarm is triggered it can be loud enough, but the speaker is near the nursery and there is now point to wake a sleeping baby when the doorbell rings. So now I have to hack a line-out jack from the Elk to mixer that blends the Denon Amp audio into the whole house speakers...or do I? "There is another [message generator]" (A "Colossus" quote when the US computer discovers the Russian one).

At one point I was going to see how much HA I could accomplish with just the Elk but I got tired of waiting for ViziaRF support (anounced today, BTW!). I finally got off the fence and bought a Hometroller 2 from HomeSeer. The very robust Z-Wave support tipped the scales for me. Another nice-to-have is the dedicated Hometroller platform which consumes very little power. I just pluged in the power, ethernet and manage the whole thing from the kitchen PC. I gave a good look at Charmed Quark which has much broader device support and an interface designer that's central, not an add-on. There are a ton of user skins for touch panels available for CQC. Fortunately, HomeSeer has done huge catch-up in this area while I was sitting on the fence with the release of HSTouch and two user contributed front-end designers, jon00's web page designer and touchscreen interface, and HAControl. Both CQC and Homeseer have very active user communities. The pricing models are a bit different. Homeseer nickles and dimes you for add-ins ($30-$40 each for simple stuff like adding a web cam). CQC gives you carte blanche but charges $99/yr for upgrades. But, hey, you knew all this already.

So now I have the option of mixing Homeseer into the house audio. We'll see what kind of choices I have there, but that's for later.

Right away, there are three things I need to get talking to HS: 1) Elk 2) Thermostats 3) Vizia RF. first the Elk. Early mission objectives are to save energy by turning down stats and turning off lights. I bought the M1G plugin and it worked right off the bat. HS found the Elk on my network like magic. No hassles. Nice. It was cool to see the zone violations showing up in HS. By default, 16 zones are recognized by HS so I had to specify my actual number (112!) and restart.

Then I walked around the house with the z-troller and enrolled my z-wave switches. I only have gotten the first floor done but that was a pretty easy job. Hold the add button on the controller, tap the switch and write the switch number the Z-troller flashes you and the switch location. Then I pluged the z-troller into the back of the HS2 and set up the interface. I went through the switch numbers and typed in all their locations. This is the most tedious part of the process. I had a little scare when all the switch names dissapeared after a reboot but a rescan found them all again. After that I had fun annoying my Mother-in-law by turning the lights on and off in her room from the kitchen. Okay, fun time is over. Then I put together some rules so the lights will turn off if the motion sensors don't see anything for 10 minutes. Now we're talking HA!

Now back to the Thermostat saga. I sent back the bum RS-485 to 232 protocol adapter and got a replacement. It turned out to be a redesigned model. Fewer LED's and the RS-232 is now traditional instead of a phone jack cable pluging into a DB-9 plug. The flying leads coming out of the box are now replaced with another db-9. Blah, blah, blah, right? Upshot was I couldn't put the adpater by the stat distribution panel, because the new cable wouldn't fit through the hole in the can where the Elk serial interface was in so I had to mount the thing in the can. Then I got the HS2 and had to pull it out again so I could plug it into the HS2 instead. I would mount the HS2 in the can, which is huge, but the security guy did a pretty sloppy job of running wires so there is a rat's nest where I'd put the HS2 (see upper-right can below):

Maybe I should work on cleaning that up but I'm worried about ripping out stuff. But I digress... Let's get back to the stats in the next message.

 

[drozwood90]

I finally watched that movie...wow...

I'm changing the name of my HS PC to Colossus!!

--Dan

 

[asteinmetz]

-- Fun With Thermostats -- and, yes, it is fun...now --

As faithful readers know, I wasn't able to get my Aprilaire stats talking to the Elk. After some good tech support chat with Aprilaire, we determined that the protocol adapter was toast so I got a new one. I hooked it up and got it to got lights to flash more than I did with the busted one but things were still wonky. When I rebooted the stats after hooking them into the network they thought they were humidistats!. The display showed the correct ambient temperature but labeled it "Relative Humidity." The setpoints were crazy and I was going crazier still. My first instinct was to blame the contractors so I triple checked all the wiring but in the end it was my wiring of the adaptor to the distribution panel. My 50-year old eyes didnt see the little crossover on the wiring diagram. Instead of

A+ --- A+
A- --- A-
B+ -- B+
B- --- B-

it was

A+ -x- A-
A- -x- A+
B+ -- B+
B- --- B-

Doh!

After that it was angel choirs from the heavens. By then I had gotten the Hometroller 2 so I plugged it the protocol adapter to one of 3 (!) RS-232 ports on the back and, voila, here they are in HomeSeer!

Now that's real HA goodness. Times being what they are I am really happy to get some control over temps in this joint. The WAF just went up because she has been complaining that the Nursery is "freezing." Here definition of "freezing" is anything sub-tropical. We do have babies in there so no-way am I pushing back on that. The nursery and MBR are one zone so I configured the Aprilaire remote sensor in the nursery to be the controlling sensor for the stat in the MBR. Wife is happy now. I am sleeping naked on top of the sheets 'cuz too hot for me in the MBR. The wife is happy, though, so you see where this goes....

 

[asteinmetz]

-- Now we're talkin'! --

It's all about quality of life, really. Putting it together is fun, sure, but you have to actually enjoy it at some point. I now have critical mass in the house ecosystem so that stuff is getting good. Remember the "Seinfeld" episode where George is eating a sandwich, listening to the Yankees game and having sex at the same time? THAT'S quality of life! I can never acheive that level but I can strive.

I put ceiling speaker wire's and holes in every room but, for now, only select rooms have speakers, including the master bath. The Denon 3808-CI Amp that powers them from the basement has a web server in it. I also have a Logitech SqueezeBox plugged into the CD input of the amp. We have a wireless router, of course. Finally, I have an iPhone. There is an excellent Squeeezebox skin for the iPhone (the oddly named "iPeng"). So...I can sit on the throne in the bathroom and bring up this in the iPhone browser:

I pick out a meditative song, then switch to this page:

Then I pick up the latest issue of "Make:" magazine and get some quality time!

Ultimately, I will bring both source control and speaker control into one page, possibly using jon00's HomeSeer interface but that's just icing. The cake is baked!

-- Art

 

[hucker]

TMI!

 

[felixrosbergen]

Finally it dawned on my what bothered me so much about art's last posting.

'Squeezebox' / 'Throne' / Bathroom....whats the differnece?? :blink:

Maybe i'm the only one that got a chuckle of that one..