Elk Compatibility - Intercom and Audio

[tmbrown97]

Hey all,

I'm about to close on a new house - much larger, blah blah blah... room for more kids and all that stuff...

I run an M1 today with a few KP2's and hardwired everything; the new house just flat out won't allow for hard-wire, so it'll require wireless; not relevant though, just informative...

The wife has been semi-tolerant... she'll accept the whole-house audio because I love it; but she hates stuff on the walls. If it were up to her, there'd be light switches on the walls, and the only automation controllers would be 3 touch screens around and a few ipod/ipad/iphones to control.

The latest monkey-wrench thrown into this thing is the fact that she'll already barely tolerate the audio keypads; now she wants multi-point intercom, and again - doesn't want crap on the wall.

So - I'll skip all the detail questions for now, and start with this... what audio systems and what intercoms are compatible with the M1???? I need to finalize wiring design in the next day or two and this is really important.

Thx!!!!!!
-TB

 

[signal15]

You cannot do wireless keypads. You will still have to wire them. There are tricks to wiring even the most difficult homes. My last house was completely finished, 4 levels, and I was able to run 4-6 ports of ethernet to every room without tearing it up. It's time consuming, but it can be done.

Instead of doing intercoms in our house, I just use Polycom IP phones with a speakerphone on them, and I set up FreeSwitch as a PBX. I have direct dial to any phone using a 4 digit extension, all unit-paging/announcements, baby monitoring, and other stuff through it. Cyberdata makes a sweet VoIP front door intercom that will work with it also:

http://www.thenerds.net/CYBERDATA.CyberDat...935^~^CYBERDATA

My ELK has it's own extension by just plugging the POTS line on the ELK into a Sipura ATA device.

No idea on the whole house audio, I haven't gone down that path yet.

 

[tmbrown97]

Hey Signal,

Yup - I know I can't get wireless keypads; that'd be a cool option though! But I doubt they'd look as good as the wired ones anyway. I also don't think I'm personally willing to accept wireless motions either - and I need to get wire to the t-stats and doorbell - so I'll be stuck with some wiring.

Sounds like some cool ideas with the IP phones; I run a few Cisco VOIP phones at home now, but they are tied to my office PBX - I'm definitely curious if I can get the the Cisco SCCP phones to work with Asterisk.

 

[signal15]

Don't do the Cisco phones with anything but Cisco Call Manager. You're wasting your money, as there are cheaper options. Plus, the Cisco phones work like crap with Asterisk. I ran Asterisk for years with just about every phone on the market. Polycom phones are by far the best, and they are the best bang for the buck also. About a year ago, I switched from Asterisk to FreeSwitch. It's a WAY better platform, but there are not really any decent GUI's for it right now. So you'd have to be comfortable with editing XML config files by hand, or downloading FreePBXv3 from their SVN. I've heard that it actually works quite well in it's current state.

Wireless motions work fine. I have a couple here, and all of them at my old house were wireless. They are just more expensive. I lived in my old house for 7 years and never ever had to replace a battery.