Radio Broadcast for Home Automation?

My home automation can speak status messages over the PC speakers. Now I want to send this messages to all rooms in our house.

Radio broadcasting seems not to be the best solution, because I would like to decide which message should be sent to which room.

I am thinking about WLAN and audio streaming, but I am not shure if this accomplishes what I need.

Does anybody have experiences with my kind of problem?

Regards, Peter

Reply to
Peter
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There are a lot of ways to do this, depending on what exactly you want to do.

The easiest way I can think of would be as easy as a relay board with your sound card as the input and a relay selects the room for output (this is simple and has a lot of limitations). Or perhaps a multichannel sound card, but this would depend on your automation software and require an amp for every channel (NCH Swift Sound makes a neat software package, Business Music System, that is capable of handling multizone music and announcements, and can be controlled from other software:

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).

Next step up would be a matrix switch with multichannel output with as few as two channels input, if for example you wanted announcement and music.

Multichannel / multizone audio distribution can get expensive pretty fast.

A professional multizone intercom device like this would work too:

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cool, but also not cheap)

Most of the wireless music streamers I have seen are set up for control at the client device, not the server. So you couldn't necessarily interrupt the music to play an announcement (they are more like for streaming audio files, than encoding and streaming live audio). There are live music streamers, but these are more in the professional range and, again, multichannel gets pretty expensive.

Reply to
none

I use this unit for switching, and control it via Homeseer. Each room has a cheap set of pc speakers, which is fine if you're just doing announcements.

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This does everything you say you want to do, selecting specific rooms on a per announcement basis etc, but you may need to write some VB code to customize it. It depends.

Stuff you'd need to buy:

Speakers for every room AB8SS unit Homeseer Homeseer AB8SS plugin

Reply to
Reg

This sounds very interesting and I understand how it works. The VB coding is no problem. I can analyze it and rewrite it into C#, which is the language of my own software.

But I have still a problem. I am missing the link between the AB8SS unit and the different rooms. Would that mean, that I have to wire all speakers from all rooms back to this AB8SS unit?

How is your solution?

Reply to
Peter

I think that "Barix Exstreamer Wireless" would do the trick. But I would need one in each room and this could be very expensive. Do you know a "cheaper" way to do it?

Reply to
Peter

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was interesting read... it sounds simple enough the way he describes it. ;)

I think it would be almost trivial to just have two listeners on the client side and mix the streams with equal volume... it's the silent one stream while the other is playing that seems tricky....

Each client (room) would listen to a different priority port. The main server would stream the main stream and each room sub-stream. might be more cpu than you want to spend...

Maybe this is easy to do... I'm just the idea/concept man... I don't know all the the technology that's out there... ;)

good luck!

Reply to
Philip Lewis

you can buy rio receivers off of ebay & use medianet server software which allows you to send TTS to any of the rio receivers. you'll need an ethernet to wifi bridge to go wireless...

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-- rl

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Reply to
rl123

Try

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UPnP stuff, nice software too.

Reply to
William at MyBlueRoom

Well you're way ahead of the game then. If you're comfortable programming then you could do it without homeseer and talk directly to the AB8SS.

I like using HS though, because you can setup the events and the trigger criteria from the HS user interface, then fill in the blanks with custom code. It's a big timesaver, and the more complex the setup the more it pays off to use HS, or something like it. I have zoned whole house announcements tied into caller id, the security system, plus other miscellaneous items.

I ran a homerun wiring configuration. I prefer it over wireless. Wiring is a pain, but it's a good long term investment.

Reply to
Reg

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