Item on home automation from w2k news

["Dr John Tankard" <john@xxxxxxx>]

Just got this from w2k news

John

Windows Based Home Automation

Summary: To be ready for a wired future, and to create an excellent
resale value of your house, retrofit or install structured wiring to
every room. This allows you to include 'internet-ready' in the ad for
your house. In other words, structured wiring is a great investment, and
a lot of fun from the moment you have it installed.

You are a professional computer user, and many of you have a home LAN,
so you may be thinking about some form of home automation, or you have
already started to a degree. I have been in the IT business for 22
years, and I'm now building a house in Belleair, Florida so let me tell
you how I came to choose and install the wiring in our new house. There
are literally whole books written about this subject so here are some
hints and tips from the trenches.

The very first thing you really need to do is to visualize your own
'ideal scene'. Then look at where you are now, and plan the project to
methodically get to your ideal scene. Do you want to start a home
automation project for energy savings, security reasons, as a hobby or
perhaps all three and even more?

You need to do a lot of thinking UP FRONT, because both the type of
wiring, and how to wire (where the drops are going to be) depend
entirely what you want to automate. The home automation industry is
still in an early stage, meaning it is relatively fragmented in the
sense of standards. Think cars in the early 1900's. The good thing is
that there is at least one existing home automation standard we can work
with, which is X10. It's s-l-o-w compared to a 100Mb ethernet network,
but it can do the job if you plan it well, up front!

When I was confronted with how to wire the house, experience in the IT
world taught me that the only constant is change. So in ten years this
area is going to look completely different from now. New industry
standards will have come and gone. So the best thing you can do is wire
as much as possible, and even overdo it a bit, for example just in case
things like video-on-demand finally make it and you need high
definition, high bandwidth to most of the rooms in your house.

So, my ideal scene was that I wanted to be able to voice control most of
the functions of the house. I wanted to be able to remotely (via the
web) control the house and make sure it would look 'lived-in' even when
we were not there. I wanted to be able to receive email and get paged
when certain events happen that were not expected (for example, the
garage door opens when both my wife and I are not at home). And I wanted
to be able to remotely see via cameras what was happening.

The final goal, over time, would be to have the house become an
intelligent agent, that would be able to anticipate certain things and
for instance go out on the Net and search for the best price of chlorine
when it monitors that the pool levels get low, and propose to me to put
an order in. The only thing left for me would be to click "yes"
and
voila! a pool company comes by and replenishes it.

Granted, setting all that up does not happen immediately. It takes a few
years when you are a busy individual. However, the first thing you need
to create is the infrastructure that will allow you to achieve this over
time. So the process I went through, was to make sure that the wiring I
needed was in place for all that and put it in now, when the drywall is
not up yet.

Essentially you need to wear the hat of an "electronic architect"
for a
while which is a fun and very creative frame of mind. Some one in our
office has a piece of paper stuck to the wall of his cubicle. "The
best
way to predict the future is to create it!" So you now need to sit
down
and ask yourself a whole bunch of home automation questions.

Next, is draw a diagram of what functions need to be where. The process
I went trough was somewhat as follows. "I need to be able to have fast
Net access in every room. I also want TV, audio, and a telephone
possible, both inside and on the patio at the pool. I'll have one
wireless access point if I want to work on a laptop in the garden. All
this needs to be accessible via a remote, by voice or by screen (local
or internet).

I want the whole thing to be intelligent, so there has to be a computer
hooked up as the central hub of all this. That means I need a server
closet where all wires will be centrally mounted and distributed. The
server closet needs its own AC duct, because it's going to get mighty
warm in there. And I want all that in the study, (not the garage) so
that I can tinker with it whatever the temperature is.

Having all those points in my mind, and scouring the Net for weeks, it
was clear what I needed to do. A "star"-topology where everything
would
wind up in the server closet and centrally hooked up. After calling some
friends and experts in the home automation, that was indeed how the
wiring was done. Structured wiring has 2 coax, 2 cat5 and 2 fiber
strands nicely tucked together in a jacket.

That means for every room you can plug a personal computer into a 100Mb
Ethernet LAN, you can intelligently distribute both video and audio, and
optical in a later stage. I decided to keep the cost down and not trim
out the fiber yet, but the Cat5 and coax will be hot from the start.
Structured Wiring costs just over a dollar per foot at on a 500 foot
spool at smarthome, which is the home automation site I like best:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020114TB-SmartHome

The good thing of double Cat5 is that you can use the second 8 strands
in there for phone, audio or other devices instead of a LAN. I also had
the house fully wired for security, with all the wiring coming to the
server closet too. The software I chose to drive the whole setup is the
HomeSeer product. You can find them here:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020114TB-HomeSeer

Reason? By far the most features, fully X10 enabled with advanced
scripting and a tremendous bang for your buck. The other thing is that
it interfaces with the Napco Gemini 3200 security system, has a web
interface and speech recognition (both in- and output).

When you are building a new house, keep in mind that you should plan the
power wiring according to your home automation plans. If you want to
drive the outside floodlights with X10, better make sure there are power
cables pulled before the drywall goes up. And while you are at it, make
sure you have deep j-boxes where X10 receptacles and switches are
planned. Last but not least, get all your heavy duty devices on one
phase, and all the other (incandescent) ones on the other phase. It will
prevent a lot of noise on your wires. And if you want to see how my new
home is progressing, here is the photo gallery with the status up to
now. The big spool with fat blue wire is the structured wiring that has
been put in.
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020114TB-Stuhome

I was given this book by one of my co-workers. It's very useful to read
and gives you the perspective of the "electronic architect" that
you
need to have before you even start automating and wiring your home. This
book gives the conceptual overview so you can ask yourself the questions
you need to answer before you start with the project. Recommended
reading!
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020114BW-HomeAutomation