For 1-2 days work, some serious HA progress

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 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!

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.

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! :-)

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."

-- Bobby G.

Actually, wife changed her mind, which improved the "I" part of it. We had some shrubs stolen, plus there was a home invasion about 2 miles away [granted, much worse part of town]. Situation sucked, but at least now we "get it".

Dang; i was trying to run some recorded TV last night, didn't have much luck unless I cranked down the settings. How much RAM do you have?

Yeah, learning is all i'm really looking for. After some of the prior posts, i'm not sure about the value of this, but it is at least cool to do :-)

That's interesting - i'm not actually sure how i'll leverage this. It's one of those "build it and i'll see how/where it's useful".

Yep.

That's a *very* standard pathway to CCTV - the "criminal act." There's a future upside: My neighbors know I've got it and last year, when a row of cars was broken into, mine got skipped. Bolsters my theory that whoever's pinching stuff is a local resident or a low-class friend of a local resident or someone workman who's familiar with the neighborhood. The cameras really aren't visible so I assume when I was skipped during the rash of smash and grabs it's because the perps knew they were there from conversations with my very chatty next door neighbor.

I think it's part of the learning curve of HA. I don't think there are many HA enthusiasts with graying or thinning hair that haven't tried occupancy sensing and associated lighting control. After my longwinded speech about never say never I'd still bet that a lot of guys have been forced to retreat from "switchless" automation back to wall switches after enough bad guesses from the household controller. That's not to say they don't still use it - I think they tend to restrict it to "payback" zones like hands-full laundry room entry, front porch lights, floods, etc.

I probably said it before, so excuse my repeating but motion sensors lights disappeared quickly all over the house after one managed to trigger with my wife peeking out through the curtains in her, well, in her sleepwear. It was just the new neighbors, having trouble wheeling their trash can to the curb but she was mortified.

The next morning I found all the little Eagle Eyes in the muffin basket under a napkin. She had removed all the batteries, too, since I'd already explained how much I hated changing them and losing programming. Her knowledge of the sensor battery came from learning why I had swiped two gold-tipped sewing needles from her sewing kit to build a little battery jig to maintain power to the sensors during a battery replacement.

Ironically, I believe when I got here to CHA, I was super enthusiastic about the X-10 ActiveEye PIR/RF gear. I believe it was Mark L. who assured me I was going to be sorry, that the devices were going to cause RF or PLC collisions. I tested and tested them while my wife was away at War College (really!) and they worked well enough to make me smile.

When she returned and the two of us began to move through to house in different directions, well, that's when all hell broke loose, at least part "One" of the Days of Hell. (-: (Just kidding, honey!) The bottom line essentially became obvious. She had no problem turning lights on and off as always. The system, as she perceived it, was entirely to cater to my lazy, no good, leaves lights burning, sorry ass.

That did change somewhat when she realized the benefits of turning on ALL the lights in case she hears someone breaking in. If you turn on just the bedroom light in a dark house with an intruder, you're essentially lighting the way to your location. It's obvious you're already going through some of the same design motivations and issues that many of us have.

I think you're in an enviable position of having a much greater array of solid HA COTS and PC equipment and SW to choose from. Many of us are stuck with some pretty big investments in teeteringly old technology.

In a perfect world, I would want the floor of every room in the house to be connected to a pressure grid sort of like a giant touch screen so that objects and motion could be located by examining the output of the matrix. The really smart home of the future will probably have thermal and pressure sensors distributed throughout the building's surfaces just the way we have such sensors in our own skin. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

John Warner has done a lot of very clever and useful things with his Speakeasy and a network of PC speakers throughout the house. It's worth reading over the details the ADI forum.

What's the CQ CPU utilization percentage on the Fujitsu 3400? Is it high enough so that it will impair full motion video?

-- Bobby G.

Barely much at all. Although when I ran my test, I wasn't actually running CQC at the time. I was looking for a full clean test. I've had some success using SageTV Placeshifter to keep the bitrate down, i'll play with that more.