Re: X10 speaker control ???

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

>Hi,
>	I'm going to fit speakers to all the rooms in my house and I was
planning
>on having a speaker switch or volume control in each room. I was just
>wondering if it's possible to also link up an X10 MS13 sensor to the
>speakers to switch them on when someone is in the room and then switch
them
>off if they leave the room.
>


You are of course, referring to occupancy detection, which is *notoriously*
difficult to get right...


>My thinking is along the lines of sending announcements to the
speakers. If
>someone is in one of my bedrooms listening to music and someone is in
the
>kitchen not listening to music, the person in the kitchen would still
want
>the ability to hear any announcements over the speakers. So that would
mean
>if the phone rang I would want it to announce who was calling in all
the
>rooms where people were, therefore I need a system that would auto
switch
>on
>the set of speakers in the kitchen, the announcement would be heard,
then
>switch them back off (also to be able to mute the stereo while the
>announcement was in progress and then un-mute it would be nice)
>
>Also the ability to override the system and say if someone leaves the
room
>leave the speakers switched on would be nice.
>

one thing: If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is there to hear it,
does it make a sound?....

.. which is an airy-fairy way of saying, why bother going to all that
trouble to do what you've described? - what does it matter if announcements
are broadcast into empty rooms? - no-one's going to complain are they!!
(no-one will even know about it!)

Seriously though, I appreciate that there *are* good reasons for wanting
zoned announcements with some intelligentce, but I don't think the scenario
you've mentioned is one of them... :-)


>I am also planning to buy Homeseer, it looks powerful enough to help me
on

It is. Also checkout Autom8it, which is currently free AIUI...


>my way to do this sort of stuff, it was just the connecting the X10
system
>to the speaker system that I can't figure out.
>
>Any ideas ????
>

Do you intend to use seperate speakers for TTS, or are you planning to
share
them with the AV devices in the rooms in question?

My thought would be to leave the TTS speakers turned off all the time
except
when announcements are actually being spoken, and don't try to do too much
with occupancy detection (its too unreliable) - rather, deduce some of the
announcement message routing in advance, - for instance, certain messages
will want to go everywhere - CallerID messages for instance, while other
messages will only ever be required in certain rooms (morning alarm message
for instance).

I find that a large proportion of the announcements I ever want to make in
my house fall into one or other of these groups. I don't worry about
messages going to unoccupied areas (like, who's going to care!), I only
care
about NOT having certain messages going to areas that ARE occupied, and
where the message is not required/relevant, etc.

£0.02

Paul G.


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