Re: For 1-2 days work, some serious HA progress

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"IVB" <ivb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

> Well, progress has been slow lately. Work has been truly horrific and
> political, and will likely continue to be so for the next 3 months. Hence,
> i'm in feast or famine mode - i either want to stay the heck away from
> everything and chill with the wife/kids, or dive into it and shut out the
> world.  I did a little of both this weekend, bought a bike&trailercar so
2yr
> old could sit in back, and get some decent progress on the HA side.

My neighbor just got one and their kid loves it.  He gets this big, fat grin
on his face that gets wider the faster they go.  I think he's going to grow
up driving in NASCAR.

> I got serious progress on 4 major fronts:
> 1) CCTV webserver working again. it broke when I tried to downgrade to
> Diginet V4.11
> 2) Front Door covert MotionDetector Camera working kinda[. Either I got
> cheap cables, cheap BNC connectors, cuz I had a HECK of a time getting a
> connection to hold. Plus, see the pics below, the image is a little funky.
> This part isn't done yet.

I recall at your site you talked about these items having a low ROI.  I
thought the same way until I ruptured a tendon.  Then I wished I had
completed the remote door lock, the front door cam and the video intercom
earlier.  As it so often happens, when I needed them most, I was unable to
move around well enough to complete the task!  It just like Mark Twain said
about roof leaks.  Can't fix them when it's raining, don't need to when it's
not!

> 3) 3400 can now run kick off a show on another PC which is hooked up to a
> TV. Uses the SageTV webserver, and I can Play/Pause/skip from 3400. This
> eliminates the need for any remotes in that room (except for TV on/off).
> This is more cuz I got excited about the progress beelzerob is making on
the
> SageTV driver than anything else, wanted to start prepping for that.

I'm very happy with my 3400.  It's powerful enough so that I can run a music
stream AND full motion video with audio *simultaneously* (which I never
expected from a 400MHz Celery processor!)  That's probably because they used
above-average components for both video and audio.

The only problem left is that the angle of view is too narrow.  I have it
mounted on the wall but there's no way to mount it so that it's equally
visible from standing or sitting.  The only thing I can think of is a
solenoid mount that changes the angle of the screen to the wall slightly
whenever I am sitting.  Not sure exactly how *that* would work without a
seat sensor and a battery powered RF transmitter to alert the wall mount
that I am sitting and to tilt downward slightly.

> 4) CQC state logic and Elk rules setup so that I can tell if there's been
> activity in a room within the last X minutes. I initially started with
> 5mins, but will probably change that to 15 once this is debugged.

We'll all need Star Trek comm badges in the future.  That's really the only
reliable way to determine who's where in the house.  I don't mean to
belittle your efforts in any way, but every expectation *I* had of reliable
occupancy sensing has been dismantled by various real-world issues.  Here's
hoping that you can get it working well enough for you to fufill your needs.
I can guarantee you one thing:  It will be a learning experience! :-)

> Wife/kids are gone next weekend, i can't go cuz of work, so i'm coming up
> with a big list of stuff to get done. With any luck, i'll pound through
> lots, but that's assuming I don't get slaughtered at work this week and go
> into hiding this weekend. I've got still 4 cameras, Elk speakers & custom
> boards so I can play custom WAV files on doorbell/telephone, network&telco
> distro, and more speakers all sitting in boxes in the living room.

I've been toying with getting an ADI "Speakeasy" to add voice prompts to the
HA but it's not a big priority.  Still, it would be nice to have.  I want to
have all phones ring through a speaker system instead of their built-in
ringers so that I can block unknown callers from ringing through at night.
The problem with that is sometimes emergency calls come in without caller ID
info and hence wouldn't ring through.  What I need is some way of answering
the phone and giving the callers the option to "press the star key if this
is an emergency."

> Here's screenshots of 2/3/4:
>
>
http://www.myhometheaterpc.com/screenshots/vladstudio/VladStudio_Camera.jpg

Looks neat.  It that all done with Charmed Quark?

--
Bobby G.