New to Home Automation need some help

[apostolakisl]

Where to put your stuff is something you have to figure out keeping in mind how you live.

I suggest you print up a large scale version of your plans, cut out scale pieces of paper to represent the furnitrue, and play like a little girl in her doll house. Live in the house with your little paper furniture and pretend people. Try different arrangments and go from there.

Think about things like motrion detector locations, speakers, wall mounted HA controllers, TV's (wall mounted or furniture mounted). Prepare for wall mounted stuff with appropriate power and data cable as well as block it so you have more freedom in placing your brackets.

Consider IR receivers for hardwired repeaters going to your HA closet.

Consider conduit to the outside from your HA closet.

Consider conduit to lots of places so you get the chance to make changes to your equipment and not have to think of everything now. For example, I didn't think of needing two HDMI cables to my family room tv from my HA closet. I have conduit, so I just dropped it in, no prob.

Are you going to want a weather station? Run wire or conduit to prepare for that.

Are you going to want your garage doors to perhaps be controlled by your HA? Run wire for that.

Are you going to want to have automatic powered door locks?

I have speakers in my master bathroom and closet. Our closet is really a room, however.

 

[timbre]

Where to put your stuff is something you have to figure out keeping in mind how you live.

I suggest you print up a large scale version of your plans, cut out scale pieces of paper to represent the furnitrue, and play like a little girl in her doll house. Live in the house with your little paper furniture and pretend people. Try different arrangments and go from there.

Oh my wife will get a kick out of that. "hey honey... let's play house..."

Consider IR receivers for hardwired repeaters going to your HA closet.

I'm confused on this one? If I am say a ipad/ipod to control the house do I really need any IR recievers? or is this a future proofing thing?

Consider conduit to the outside from your HA closet.

Consider conduit to lots of places so you get the chance to make changes to your equipment and not have to think of everything now. For example, I didn't think of needing two HDMI cables to my family room tv from my HA closet. I have conduit, so I just dropped it in, no prob.

Are you going to want a weather station? Run wire or conduit to prepare for that.

Are you going to want your garage doors to perhaps be controlled by your HA? Run wire for that.

Are you going to want to have automatic powered door locks?

I have speakers in my master bathroom and closet. Our closet is really a room, however.

Never thought of running a conduit to the outside world.

I can automate my garage doors???? that might be scary

and yea... the closet is a room... sheesh 8x13 if you look at the plan.

 

[apostolakisl]

As far as to the outside, there is lot of stuff you might want to automate outside, the most likely would be irrigation. But lighting setups, pool pumps, bug poison misters, who knows what.

It is very nice having the garage doors on the HA. I push one button from a keyfob in my car and it closes the doors, turns all the house lights off, and arms the system. Plus, I have used it on several occasions to let service guys in from the office along with the video cameras I used to watch them. I wrote the rules on my Elk and it works like a charm closing whichever of the three overhead doors is open. It also closes the doors when I manually arm the system at bedtime if they got forgotten open.

As far as IR repeaters. I expect that someday soon all new high end stuff with remote controls will use wireless IP instead of IR. In the meantime, I have IR repeaters in most rooms in my house that I can point an IR device at and it repeats in my HA control room. You can run that the other way as well so IR from the media room can shoot out into your other rooms. This is very valuable if you want your ipad to send an IP command to your HA closet and have that translated into IR that controls your TV (or whatever) that is not actually in the HA room.

 

[timbre]

ok I think I have some of this down.

From the outside in. I'm going to run 4 runs for either direct tv / dish network from a masthead to the wiring closet. Also add a single run from the local cable provider termination masthead on the side of the house. Probably will run the 4 sat runs in a conduit for future upgrade capabilities.

From the closet I will be running 2 conduits to the theater area. 1 to the equipment rack and 1 to the projector. I also am going to put two conduit runs straight up to the attic for future use.

For home security each window and door is going to be hardwired with all control returning to the wiring closet. Each room in the house including bathrooms will have a minimum of 1 cat5e and 1 coax run with a few rooms having more.

master bedroom will also have a hardwire IR repeater installed so I can remove all sat/cable boxes to the wiring closet.

Most major room will be wired for a whole house audio. I plan to run this from a Windows home server box.

This is where my next question comes in.

I am looking for some sort of program to run on a Android platform. I am hoping for either control of Itunes or Zune on the server. This is my plan for controling the audio in the house. Both myself and the wife have android phones and usually have them with us at all times. If we aren't home, who cares about the audio.

Downstairs the theater will be controlled by an ipad (havn't yet determinded the software package running on it yet.) I want to move all of my movies from my changer onto a server based setup (also need help here deciding on what frontend to run.)Insteon dimmers with a ISY99 will be my lighting source.

I might run a few insteon outlets under the eaves for christmas lighting. I know the outlets are going to be in place but being able to shut them off might be nice.


Am I missing anything?

I'n not really concerned about cameras

Other than possibly being able to change the HVAC setting remotely the rest I'm not worried about.

 

[apostolakisl]

Sounds like you have a good plan.

Can't help on the Android stuff, I have iphone.