Hello From SoCal

[paradise]

Hey everyone, just in the planning stages of moving into a new house in the next 5-6 months. Been lurking a ton on the boards, and gained a lot of good insight. Looking like we'll be going with HomeSeer, Z-Wave lighting and lock controls and still up in the air about whole house audio.

Video will be HDMI through a Matrix switcher and then distributed out over CAT6 to the house.

Big things I need some help on right now, how difficult will it be to script the RS232 commands for the HTD MRC-66. The protocol seems sketchy at best, and requires checksums etc. Looks like a pain...

The SDK can be found by googling "MCA66-SDK". On the homeseer board is a link (that I can't post).

I'll post this up in the other sections, but I think I had to post here before creating topics elsewhere

Zack
**Attached the SDK below**
View attachment MCA66-SDK.pdf

 

[tmbrown97]

Welcome to CT!

One piece of advice - Personally I'd avoid using the HDMI over Cat6 if you can - it's way better to pull some rapidrun cables or similar... those baluns are expensive and flaky. Of course it never hurts to have the Cat 6 around for future... I'm sure it won't be terribly long before we can just put an IP based extender at each TV and skip all these proprietary cables altogether.

 

[apostolakisl]

Welcome to CT!

One piece of advice - Personally I'd avoid using the HDMI over Cat6 if you can - it's way better to pull some rapidrun cables or similar... those baluns are expensive and flaky. Of course it never hurts to have the Cat 6 around for future... I'm sure it won't be terribly long before we can just put an IP based extender at each TV and skip all these proprietary cables altogether.

I agree. I had nothing but trouble using those things. You can buy HDMI cables in 100 feet and longer runs that work consistently.

 

[paradise]

I had never seen those cables before. They look very nice and really not too terribly expensive...

Question though, would that be any better than a long hdmi cable, say a really nice 22awg cable?

 

[tmbrown97]

Depends on if you have tight spaces to pull it through... I've used the rapidrun where I had conduit in the concrete foundation for conference room hookups... it'll pull through the flex conduit nicely too, and doesn't require as big of holes in your headers... but if you've got the access to run normal cables, that works too... I'd do that in a hearbeat over getting one of those converters in the mix. The only ones I've had work OK were the ~$500 ones and they would have sync issues at times.

The other nice advantage of the rapid-run cables is that they have wallplates that'll hook to the cable ends so you get real clean termination pretty easily, and some amount of futureproofing to repurpose the cable with a different "head".

 

[apostolakisl]

I have purchased 6 of the long distance cables off of ebay. They are dirt cheap. I did have one that wouldn't work out of 6 total (7 including that one). I have 4 50 footers and 2 75 footers. The one that didn't work was a 50 footer and it was one of the first two I bought 3 years ago.

And as work2play mentioned, you may need to get those fancy ones without the bulky plug permanently afixed to it if you are pulling through conduits. I have pulled mine through conduits, but I have 1.5 inch conduit going into the media closet. As far as I know, there is no way for an end user to crimp on their own ends.