Re: New to the scene

["Harrison, Mark (Alliance)" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Kieran

Welcome!

To take your points in turn, and offer what I can, please see below. I must
lay my cards on the table and say that I'm not an X.10 fan, though, and
wouldn't use it to control lighting, but that's a result of being a bit
obsessive about lighting flexibility.

1:
Assuming you want to "get some equipment and play", the places to
talk to
are Laser Business Systems (tel: 0181 441 9788, http:\\www.io.com\~lbs),
HomeTech (01603 870662, http:\\www.hometech.co.uk) or indeed Maplin (the
ubiquitous chain store.)

You can find a fuller list of suppliers on http:\\www.ukha.demon.co.uk, as
well as a number of product reviews. Mark McCall, the web site owner, is
also a leading light (if you'll pardon the lighting control pun) of this
distribution list.

A good setup for "experimenting" would be:
--- "Controller to plug into your PC"
--- A PC, which I assume you have
--- X.10 lighting controller (can be dimmed)
--- X.10 relay (can't be dimmed)

Laser do a series of "starter kits", which might be worth a look.

2:
No idea! Don't know enough about how Dragon Dictate can interface back to
other programs on your PC. (If you know, please drop me a line, 'cos I'd be
interested to find out!)

3:
Some kind of balanced cabling would seem to be in order. The two ways I can
see to do it would be to run balanced mics (which, as you say, would almost
certainly want to plug into an XLR setup), and to have a local Pre-amp
brought the signal up to line level and then modulated onto UTP (this is
how
Linn Knekt distrubutes audio, and it cetainly gives the right quality.)

I'm not sure how you envisage the mics being fitted. If you're talking
about
a series of "wall plates which you go up to and speak into", then
I would
guess that a low sensitivity, and a noise gate on each mic would be all
you'd need, then you could literally mix them together and run a feed into
your PC.

If you're considering putting mics all over, so you can literally raise
your
voice anywhere, and have it heard by the system, I think you'd need to
think
quite carefully about how to manage ambient noise, particularly
TV/Music/Movie noise. If you have multi-room audio, then you could take a
feed from the room-specific soundtrack, invert it, (possibly delay it by a
few milliseconds) and mix it with the microphone input (amplifies to line
level) to cancel its own noise. In principle this could be done with
analogue audio kit, but you might end up needing to do some DSP stuff.
(Quite possible with a modern PC and soundcard, but a pig to program.)

4:
At the simplest level, you can get PC/X.10 interface cards that the PC
talks
to by squirting ASCII characters down a serial port. As such "cat
ALLON.TXT
> /dev/com1"
(where /dev/com1 is your serial port, and ALLON.TXT is a text file of X.10
commands you made earlier) should work...

<< These views are mine, not those of BP, not those of Bovis, all
mine >>

Mark Harrison
European IT Manager, BP/Bovis Alliance
Tel: +44 181 869 1439
Fax: +44 181 423 7711
SMTP: Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx

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