DaveAndrus.com

(Note: Newer posts at the bottom. I know–very un-blog-like.)

After selling my very automated home in Utah and moving to Silicon Valley, I’m starting over again. I have mixed feelings about that.

First of all, our new house already had the drywall in place when we bought it, so there was no chance to add any wiring, extra outlets, media cabling, or whathaveyou. It is also much harder to know where to route wiring and whatnot when you don’t have a visual record of what the house’s “bones” look like.

Secondly, this house, as most in Northern California, lacks a basement. Basements are great places to “home run” all of your cabling to, and where you can easily set up the breakout panels, computers, and other things that go into your home control system.

And thirdly, this house isn’t nearly as large as our Utah home, so there just aren’t as many interesting things to do with an advanced control system. Case in point: Christmas lights. Our Utah home had special under-eaves AC outlets that were all controllable from four switches in the front entry hall closet. These switches were Leviton X-10 types, so all of our Christmas lights were easily and effortlessly turned on and off by my home automation controller,a JDS Stargate.

Now, I’m still controlling the Christmas lights on the new house with X-10, but I have to kludge together a system using the plug-in X-10 receivers you see at Radio Shack or Fry’s. Since they’re not made for outside use, I also encase them in plastic bowls or baggies. I’ve tied up both outlets from the garage, and the one external outlet about 5 feet from the front door, using a total of four different X-10 receivers. Bleh. Not nearly as clean, and I have to drag them out each year along with the annual untangling of the icicle lights ceremony.

So, follow me while I try to automate a 2 year old home without poking too many holes in the wall (well…). In brief, it is:

1900 square feet
2-story design
3 bedrooms
2.5 bathrooms
2-car garage
automatic sprinkler system
1 “media outlet” per room, consisting of:
- 2 runs of RG-6 coax
- 2 runs of Cat-5 cable
(one cable dedicated to the telephone system)
DSC burglar alarm with one LCD panel near the door going to the garage
(embedded entry switches on the lower-story doors and windows, one PIR detector in living room)
cables and burglar alarm are home-run to the very small front hall closet
(you have to remove all of the coats to open the access panel)

I’ll also refer you to a previous post I made about home automation controllers here. I’m presently running the simple timer function for the Christmas lights on a Mac Mini running Indigo. Took almost no effort at all to set up and run. The Mini is running headless most of the time (no display or keyboard attached), and I use Timbuktu Pro to log in to it to make any changes. The Mini is also the family iTunes server. Again, no-brainer to set up and use.

I’m still wavering about which controller to use. I have another Stargate and LCD keypad from my previous home (I bought it as a development system so that I wasn’t testing new things on the family all the time). The main advantage to the Stargate is that it has lots of great I/O built in to it already. It will be a bit more difficult to get the same level of connectedness with the Mini, although it is doable.

I like the Stargate’s philosophy of using RS-485 to control things external to itself, but it’s much less convenient to try and run an RS-485 cable through finished construction. The main things I’d use it for would be the home’s main thermostat, the LCD keypad (human interface to the Stargate), and probably a sprinkler controller. I have these RS-485-controllable boxes with 8 relays in them from JDS that would work well.

The main negative for the Stargate is its level of web connectedness. Originally, the only way to interact with the Stargate was to connect a 9600 bps serial cable to a Windows machine, and run WinEVM, the software that JDS originally designed to run on Windows 3.0. WinEVM is still the primary interface today, however there is now a web expander module that allows some level of control and interaction via Ethernet. That’s more in the direction I’d prefer, but my impression is that it’s clunky, is still wedded to WinEVM, and it is an additional add-in module that costs about two-thirds as much as a whole new Mac Mini! Ouch. Stargate is not for cheapskates, although I certainly recognize JDS’s need to make a profit on such a comprehensive piece of gear, and there are even much more expensive controllers out there such as the HAI Omni series.

A third option would be to have both the Mini and Stargate running in the same house. Overkill, yes, but since I already have the Stargate…I could use it to run the HVAC and sprinkler systems, monitor light/dark and use remote temeperature sensors easily. The Mini could run all of the lights and whatnot that uses X-10 control. Hmmm…that just doesn’t sound very neat and tidy, does it?

No, I think the real solution is to find ways to connect all of the I/O’s to the Mini. After all, it already has web connectivity built in, and very nice connectivity at that. I can even write new programs, start and stop them, and monitor things from anywhere in the world. I’ll need a USB-to-serial-to-RS-485 converter, probably at least two dongles deep. I also need to make sure it will do the funky half-duplex RS-485 protocol that is compatible with the JDS stuff. Aprilaire, maker of the RS-485 thermostat I used in Utah had a little red box that made the proper conversion. I’ll have to see if they still make it. Or…I could abandon the use of RS-485 altogether and use X-10 control for the thermostat and sprinklers. I have an expensive Marrick Ltd. Lynx board that will work as a sprinkler control.

I’d have to get an X-10 thermo…but I just hate the idea of controlling important things via X-10. It works fine for me, but it doesn’t take much to kill it. Bring home a new computer with a power supply that filters out X-10 and all of a sudden the lights don’t work. Bleh. I can’t wait for Insteon or ZigBee-enabled devices to become more widely available. Much more reliable. Eventually I think ZigBee will rule the world for wireless controls.

(Added Mar. 3, 2006)

Been soooo busy that I haven’t done a thing yet, and Dede’s STILL dithering over maybe buying a bigger house in a different location further north (like Los Gatos, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc.). You can easily pay $1 million for real trash there. I saw one house that was right in front of the sound wall for the 85 freeway, directly under some very high-voltage towers, and in an old neighborhood. The house itself was built in the early 60’s, and was about the same square footage as our present one. All for the bargain-basement price of $915,000! No way.

Automation-wise, I bought a DSC spread-spectrum wireless receiver and one universal door/window transmitter so I could begin “wiring up” all of our windows, not just the token 3 doors our builder had the alarm contractor do. Now I’ve got to buy the more-capable alpha-numeric keypad to replace our fixed-message LCD keypad that came with the system. Seems that you can’t program in any new devices without it. Eh. Always something in the way. At least smarthome.com is very decent about letting you download .pdf copies of all of the devices’ manuals, even without buying them first. I left my old DSC manuals with the Utah home’s new owners. Maybe I’ll get at least one window monitored before summer

(Added May 29, 2007)

So far, about one new update per year! Yeah, that’s just about how fast this is going, too! Haven’t installed or even played with the thermostat or the DSC wireless gear. It’s all spare-time stuff, and I don’t have any. Not that I’m complaining. I enjoy my work at Apple, and don’t find time for too many other enterprises as “vacation” or hobby time. We should all have such problems, eh?

One big thing we have done is–drum roll–added a really spiffy home theater system! We did some demolition, cutting and sawing and drywalling, and ended up with a nice built-in fireplace with a 46-inch Sony Bravia XBR-3 LCD TV surface-mounted over the top of it. I designed a cubby hole behind the TV for all of the equipment, so it’s totally hidden (important spouse approval factor). Sound system is a Bose Lifestyle 28. Very nice system with active equalizer–you put on something that looks like headphones (actually stereo mikes) and stand in various places in the living space while the system calculates the best frequency response and speaker balances, then stores the data. I couldn’t be happier with the sound. The wife loves the “live” feel of the sound when we play things encoded in Dolby 5.1.

So, maybe in the near future I’ll mention how I rolled it all together, and my new search for a holy grail–a decent all-in-one remote control that makes it possible for mere humans to control the system.