RE: Uber-Cool was RE: Does the world.....

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Timothy Morris [mailto:timothy.morris@xxxxxxx]
>Sent: 22 February 2002 16:43
>Subject: RE: Uber-Cool was RE: [ukha_d] Does the world.....
>
>Is that using Homevison Ian, or have you rolled your own. If so can you
>talk us through it please?
>
>Tim.

It's home-grown Tim.. Here's a summary of how it works..

Infrastructure:

We have four "populated" zones in the house: Bedroom, Office,
Living Room,
Kitchen/Dining Room. To each of these zones, we have a couple of cable
drops, each with four CAT-5 and a SCART Connection, built into a modified
Leviton faceplate. These are all wired back to node zero.

One of the CAT-5 connections is used as an Infra Red Bus, which provides
(currently) a path from the zones to node zero, and (in progress) a return
path from node zero to the IR controllable devices.

In each zone we have an AV Device, In the kitchen, its a wall mounted
portable, and a small set of 2.1 speakers with inbuilt amp, in the office,
we use my PC (via a Win-TV Card) for video, and the PC's speakers/amp for
audio. These are plugged into X10 App modules.

In addition, the Central Heating/Hot water is now on X-10 too.

At Node Zero I have the following Sources:
A Sky Digibox,
An FM Radio tuned to our favourite station,
a VCR,
"Turing" our home server (which has an ATI AIW Card for TV out,
and an
SBLive Sound Card) and
Response 4 Camera Switcher for CCTV

These sources are fed into an IR controllable AV Switch.
The output of this switch drives a Keene Distribution Amp, which sends
Audio
and Video to each of the Zones in the house.

There is a UIRT (Universal Infra Red Transceiver) connected to Turing, and
this provides the means for IR control in and out..

Turing is running the following Software:
Homeseer, talking to a CM11
Girder, talking to the UIRT
IIS5 (its a Win2K Server) serving up some custom .ASP pages
IE5 in Kiosk mode, set to Turing itself.

Homeseer has all of the X-10 devices set up, and IIS/Homeseer are
configured
to use COM to allow ASP Code to send X-10 Commands from the web page

Girder has a bunch of commands set up, of the variety "SKYONE"
{AVSwitch to
Source 1, Sky "1", Sky "0", Sky "6"} and
using TCPIP server plugin for
Girder, and the standalone client.exe (a command line util which can pass
Girder command triggers to the Server) I can also send any (pre-defined) IR
command from the Web interface.

In day to day usage, the Home page on my desktop PC is set to turing, so If
I don't like the song playing on "Kerrang" for instance, I can
fire up a
browser (usually have one running anyway) and hit the "Q Music"
Channel icon
instead.

Clicking this link loads the iraction.asp page into a hidden zero width
frame with the parameter "QMUSIC". This .asp page causes
sendgirder.exe to
run, which sends the command "QMUSIC" to the Girder Server. This
fires the
"QMUSIC" event, which sends the commands to switche to digibox,
and send
"453" to the UIRT.

If I wish to boost the heating (which I just did) I click the "Home
Auto"
tab, and the "Boost 2Hr" button, which loads the x10action.asp
page instead,
with the "G1 ON" paremeter, which is then passed to Homeseer. (G1
being a
virtual device which brings the heating on for 2 Hours).

and that's pretty much it (apart from Winamp control, which is more of an
OT
thing)

Ian.