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Creating a Clever Home?
eKto1 asks: "We've recently purchased an older, dated home which we are in the process of gutting and restructuring. While there are no walls, we are obviously running the standard Cat5, and speaker cable to each and every room, however we would also like to modernize the house even more by making it intelligent, as in 'Smart'. I'd like to install touch screens in the majority of the rooms, to control things such as media (separate audio and video to each wall unit), lighting, temperature, etc. For those of you on Slashdot who have done this, what has your experience been? Are there guides for doing this easily and effectively, without having to sell the farm? Is there a way to allow distributed content to head units while keeping servers down to one or 2 units?"
BRING MONEY
A vertical run of conduit (hopefully through closets) from basement to attic will likely save you headaches later.
It'll save you heartache and work down the road.
Before embarking on your project, I would highly recommend you watch this compelling and informative docudrama.
Forewarned is forearmed, after all...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Don't install CAT5 just do wireless. It's much cheaper. If you want a station for each level just put a crossover between floors and you're done.
"For those of you on Slashdot who have done this, what has your experience been? "
Good
"Are there guides for doing this easily and effectively, without having to sell the farm?"
Yes.
"Is there a way to allow distributed content to head units while keeping servers down to one or 2 units?"
Yes
You're going to end up with a "buggy" house that is unsellable.
Do you really want to be dependent on a server for your thermostats & lights to work properly? Or have to rip out and replace video gear every few years when your OS or applications change?
So you'll shell out thousands on computer & X10 equipment, then when you decide to move, you're left losing gobs of cash unless you find some dork who wants to take on a house full of aging computer & control equipment.
I won't even get into having a TV in every room.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Maybe you already are, but just in case (and for those who are considering this): consider energy costs first.
Smart homes seems like a neat idea, but what is the gain over just putting a stereo in each room, and a wi-fi receiver for those rooms where you really want mp3s? (As long as you need to remove the inside walls anyway you may as well run CAT-5, but for most people wi-fi works well)
Spend your budget first on low-E windows, and good insulation. Then put in a good heating/cooling system (preferably a ground source heat pump).
Saving energy will make the world a better place, and in the long run is good for your wallet. Your 'smart home' is not very smart if it wastes energy, and at best won't make the world a better place.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea. I'm just urging you to take care of the important parts first, then the toys. I also encourage you to think about the toys. If you don't have a radio of some sort in your current bathroom, why put one in.
Use the Coolest door ever.
this is a project that should be done it at least two steps. the only thing you really want to worry about now is getting the wires into the walls. so plan on things like (as you say) cat-5 (i suggest cat-6 incase gigabit become affordable in the future), speaker wire, and don't forget enough electrical sockets. i honestly don't think it's too much to ask for one electrical socket on each stud. make sure they're on different circuit breakers, and if possible maybe set up some of them to be uninterruptable. my ideal wall would have a socket on each stud. 2 out of every three would be regular sockets - but on different circuits, and 1 out of three would be on an uninterruptable circuit that's managed elsewhere in the house. you could even look into the new standard 12VDC power that's starting to be popular for some lightning. it wouldnt hurt to put a line of 12VDC in the wall too.
once you have all the wires in the wall, then you can worry about hardware. the nice thing is that you don't need to worry about it now. you can just put in a cheap thermostat now and later when you say, "hey, i'd like to control the thermostat with my webserver" you can then put in a new thermostat and you'll already have the wires in the wall and you can set up the webserver to control the thermostat. likewise with anything else, you can add touch screens later. the benefit to going with normal stuff now and upgrading later is that it forces you to think modularly. if you put in touch screens now and set everything up with those screens, you'll probably be mad next year when newer less buggy hardware is out there and it's impossible for you to upgrade. if you think modularly, then you can upgrade the hardware however you want.
the same goes for your server room. don't worry now about how many servers it's going to take to run your house. just make sure you have a room wired properly that you can put servers in. then when you start putting more services online and you need more computing power, it'll be easy to upgrade as necessary. for example after you get bored having the lights and heat controlled by the computers, you can later upgrade and write your own security system that monitors the windows and doors at night. if some one breaks in, it'll wake you up, auto dial 911, automatically unlock the gun cabinet and give you a lighted path from your bed to the gun cabinet (or at least that's my dream for my comptuer controlled house).
Set up a main house fileserver, make it SCSI and RAID. Then, setup a tftp/nfs server on it and use PXE to boot all of your clients from this main server. This way instead of having to do an OS install on each machine and worry about drives dying you have one server handling everything. It's easier to make backups this way too.
Plus the lack of a grinding hard drive is quite welcome.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
I say make sure to run CAT6e, which will nicely handle Gigabit over Copper. You may want to stream some sort of HD video or other high bandwidth signal in the future over the network, so go with a cabling that will work. I would also run at least two RJ45 ports into each room, more in the large rooms. Don't worry about phone lines, you can always wire up from the patch panel a traditional line into one of your feeds, and RJ11 (phone) plugs into RJ45.
Power! People overlook this. Make sure to put in enough outlets. I don't even know how many extension cords and power strips I am running now. I wish my house had twice as many outlets, and it was built in 1999!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
The older the home, the more dangerous it may be, as paint manufacturers steadily cut the lead content of their paints from the turn of the century on. Don't guess, get it checked. And, if you have children, walk away and bleed money if you have to rather than expose them to lead.
That's what we did, and I now own a home built in 2003, and am very grateful that I don't need to worry about my kids' being poisoned by it.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I've been into this for close to 30 years now. I've been in my current house for 17 years, and I've rewired FOUR TIMES as the technology has changed.
I can absolutely tell you that the most important thing you can provide is ACCESS. Several others have mentioned conduits and wiring channels, and I can't overemphasize how much I agree with that. The only thing that's saved me is the suspended ceiling downstairs, and the clear opening between there and the attic. You don't want to be opening walls a year or two down the road because you need a new kind of wire somewhere.
X10 is great when it works, but it's inherently limited. Unfortunately, the alternatives are WAY more expensive. You can do a really cool setup with a couple hundred dollars worth of X10 stuff, and old Linux PC, and a web app from Freshmeat. Start off simple, you can always add wireless tablets as touch screens down the road when someone is selling them off cheap.
Using NX/VNC/etc type things to a terminal server should lower your cost substantially.
Shadus
Reliable or cheap. That's your major choice here. If you want reliable, what you want is an extra run of CAT 5e to every outlet and switch in the house, so that you can choose from a variety of hardwired remote control switches. If you want cheap- you'll want to go with X10, A10, or one of it's variants, in which case you'll want 3-wire power to every switch, including ground, and while you're rewiring all the electric anyway you'll want to install a signal bridge in the switch panel, so that the electirical phases are linked.
For software, well, that depends on your favorite operating system and programming language: HAL or HomeSeer for Windows, Mr. House for Linux, all three of these choices have a variety of dynamic libraries that allow them to control most whole-house controllers.
I personally went cheap- but still ran out of money about $1200 into my system. So I've got PLC, in a house that doesn't have 3 wire to every outlet, with only the incandescents and only 2 flourescents actually computer controlled. I also never got my infrared breakout boxes done to control my A/V equipment- and PLC turned out to be rather non-secure in my neighborhood for controling garage door opener and the like (in that it would leave my garage door open and illegal immigrant meth adicts would steal from me in the middle of the night). So if you have the money, you're much better off with a hardwired system. And go for a discount wholesaler like http://www.worthdist.com/ as opposed to somebody like http://www.smarthouse.com/>.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What would you guys suggest in my case. My house has NO attic (vaulted ceilings) and NO basement (split level). Without ripping up the floors and walls, how the hell do I run cables with it being ugly?
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And by research, I don't mean asking Slashdot.
Write down what you want to have in each room. Go wild, put down everything. Touch screen, ethernet, remote control, whatever.
Then see what's out on the market that will do what you want. What kind of remote control options are there? Is there an alternative?
Then start trimming back. Do you REALLY need to control the thermostat from EVERY room? Do you REALLY need remote-controlled lighting in EVERY room? Chances are, you can cut back quite a bit.
If I had to pick one thing to do, I'd say to lay some conduit to every room, and put Cat5 (or 6 even) and a string in each one. No speaker wire, though. If you want to listen to music, put a stereo in that room and grab the music via the Cat5.
Do that, and you'll be relatively future-proofed without getting stuck on some technology that may be obsolete in 5 or 10 years.
That being said, pre-wiring is the most important aspect of what you will be doing. Depending on your budget you will want to wire CAT5 (or 6e) into all light switch and telephone locations. At a minimum you will need CAT5 to every video location.
Wireless technology is too dependant on outside factors to be reliable. Good old copper gets the 1s and 0s to the correct place much more efficently. Plus, if it's called for, power over ethernet doesn't work very well wirelessly :) CAT5 isn't just for bits and bytes any more. It works great for remote thermostat sensors, infrared transmission, etc..
While we install touch panels by AMX Corp. the same thing can be done with a cheap touch overlay'ed display, PXE, and VNC. I would recommend staying away from X10 products. If you don't want to spend the time to write your own control software, the NetLinx programming language (used on AMX products) is easier than learning QBasic. Some of their controllers show up on Ebay for reasonable amounts.
The single most preventative aspect of this project is the amount of time involved. We will spend months in design, prewire, install, and programming on even relatively small systems. But if your wiring is not in place, no amount of time spent will be as productive.
But you could save yourself a lot of time by checking out Pluto
http://homephonewiring.com/ is a really good website for understanding the whats and whys about installing proper cabling in your house. The site was a big help to me when I redid all the phone/data cable in my house last year. The guy does sell some stuff on the website, but the information is excellent whether you decide to buy from him or elsewhere. I did end up buying a punchdown block from him and it was a fair price and shipped quickly. Other stuff I got either locally or on Ebay.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Put a water outlet/inlet by each socket, and a central cooling/pumping station outside. Install water cooling in each computer in the house, and have them quiet, fast and cool :D
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Not true. Ground source heat pumps work just fine in the far north. However you must go deeper. If you live in the south you can get by with pipes in a trench just a few feet below ground. In Canada you need to drill a well, as a shallow trench will freeze up and produce nothing. (A 24 foot deep trench might work, a 10 foot deep trench will not) If you have the land a shallow trench is much cheaper than a well.
Maybe when you get to permafrost to very deep a ground source heat pump won't work even with wells, but most of Canada is isn't that cold.
Sounds like a job for SunRay Server! You can even run the server software on Linux....
For those without a sense of humor: this may actually work--if it were me I'd be looking into it more than casually--but I'm mostly joking.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The parents have a heat pump in their new home. I'm told it doesn't have enough power to heat the house once the outside air goes below -20C or so.
At that point they start up the good old woodstove to supplement the heat pump.
Next thing to do in the cleverness front is to actively protect the house. Some of this will indeed involve wiring:
Anyway, I just want to express that there is more to a smart house than just internet and audio/video.
I think that the wiring part got covered in another post. the other items that your talking about though are:
home "control" is normally kind of customized to the home by the installer, but the last one that i helped put in was an elan system. (http://www.elanhomesystems.com/)
For lighting you really need to look into lutron (http://www.lutron.com/) and then hook them together.
"Where ever you go, there you are"
Money for nothing, pix for free
Your CO detector. They are just as important as your fire/smoke alarms, and in some areas (such as Toronto) they are now required by law. Particularly if you're going to be using a whole load of gas appliances. Carbon Monoxide is bad m'kay?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
OK, this being Slashdot Everyone talks about the networking and forgets everything else. We've just had a quick brainstorming session here in the office and here's what we came up with:
1) Thermostats in every room, if possible linked to the HVAC to regulate temperature on an individual room basis.
2) Movement sensors and heat sensors in every room. Use these together and you can turn the lights on and off as someone enters and exits a room. They can also be used for burglar alarms and fire detection.
3) Motorized blinds on each window. You regulate the heat so why not regulate the light level?
4) Run a ring of 50-pair cable round the house with drop points in each room. This won't be good enough for computer networking but it can carry signals from sensors and commands to motors throughout the house.
5) Fit a whole-house UPS
6) Fit a whole-house vacuum system for cleaning. Just one big collection cylinder in the basement and nothing too heavy to carry around.
7) Panic buttons in each room
8) Numerical keypad instead of front door locks. Never lose your keys again.
Discuss.....................
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
http://plutohome.com/ - Open Source, free as in beer and mostly free otherwise. If you want a roll-your-own Home automation package with media capabilities, this is the way to go.
I recommend that you put in simple light switches that turn large numbers of lights on and off. so, instead of each room having 3 lighting "zones" (kitchen: counters, island, sink, blah blah) just have a switch at each entrance to the room that will turn all the lights in the room on, and then off again on your way out. you will save in the long run, on bulbs, electricity, and precious minutes of your life.
I think the illegality that the poster is referring to is that to install conduit as suggested can cause fire/gases to be conducted from one area of the building to another, spreading the fire or poisonous gases thereby reducing the occupants' safety.
This can be resolved -- and in fact is generally required -- by sealing the conduit with some sort of firestopping material after cables are pulled. You may wish to use a material which may be removed to facilitate expansion.
And this, I might point out, is the realm of the electrical inspector, not the building inspector.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You will increase the worth of your house if you use a standard, Don't make a bunch of stuff yourself.
http://www.crestron.com/
I would highly reccomened using crestron. as much as it will be cheaper to do it yourself. other people have said it, its going to make people not want to buy your house later on if you do need to move.
I'm planning this at the moment for when we have some building work done, and while googling and talking to different people I found the http://swhowto.com/ (Structured Wiring HOWTO), and IMHO wiring is going to be the hardest part of the project.
Once my wiring is done, I'm going to build 4 or 5 'kiosk' type units into/onto walls in different parts of the house. Each kiosk unit will contain a mini-itx board (most likely from LinITX), small touch screen (most likely from EarthLCD.com) and will be connected to the network via gigabit ethernet utilizing the cable I layed using (partly) the mentioned HOWTO.
I also want two portable 'kiosk' type units, but I haven't researched enough to comment.
You should look into software at the same time you decide what hardware you're getting to run your setup - not before, not after.
If you're using stock, cheap stuff such as X10, lots of OSS software to run on all kinds of hardware is already available but you've got to be able to spend time configuring and diagnosing when things go wrong.
I'm no where near an expert, and I'm only really posting to give you the valuable link - but I would love to know what other people were planning so I've given you (I hope) a small insight.
Apologies for my shitty punctuation and English in general actually, I just looked over my post and it's full of andandandand but hey, I'm tired.
- phil.
We put automatic blinds in our house. They run on a remote or a timer and use 8 AA bats.
Sometimes the bats last more than a year, but sometimes only 6 months.
They sell a transformer you can use for the system, but you would need to run wires from a crawlspace / cabinet to the top of your windows. Security wires usually run only to the bottom.
About $200 per window online for normal window.
It is pretty sweet to show off to people all four windows in our great room going up / down.
As a contractor, I can say with certainty that, although lead and asbestos are real concerns that absolutely should be addressed during renovation, the notion that new houses DON'T poison your children is optimistic in the extreme.
Mostly, new house toxins are vapors. New houses are so buttoned up that indoor air pollution is a much bigger concern now than it's ever been- new wall-to-wall carpeting offgasses some really bad stuff, as well as the adhesive sometimes used to stick it. Badly planned or installed heat and AC can be real trouble, leaking CO and growing toxic mold (Which will kill you dead). If you live in an area with granite bedrock, Radon is still a concern, too. And the juice from pressure treated wood (should't be used indoors, but often is...) is another source.
A new, carelessly built house can be very bad for you.
A few ideas here:
I run as my home servers a bunch of PC's based on VIA's epia motherboard. The max power consumption per unit is about 40W, and the heat output is negligable. My Nehemia built-in support for memory cards (great as a boot device, use a 1GB card, 1GB+ RAM for ramdisk/tempfiles) and a PCMCIA card, as well as integrated sound, ethernet, firewire, USB, DVD acceleration, basic GL acceleration (no Doom 3, but Neverball plays fine) and an onboard 1Ghz CPU. Between VIA and the Epia sites I've had little problems finding drivers for all the hardware, though initial configuration was a pain.
Now onward to the house part... I'd recommend having the standard panels for adjusting your temperature/lights, and having the touchscreens/etc tie in as a secondary interface. Any computer can fail... and it's nice to have the standard stuff in place.
Conduits are your friend, seal the ends to comply with gas-transmission issues after you've run wire, and don't forget to run an extra wire-string to pull through future wiring.
I've seen interesting projects on motion-sensor type device that weren't too pricey. One of those would be neat for activating lights on entry, etc.
If you have a central "server" location (really, an Epia or two should work fine), you could setup the other machines to PXE-boot... in which case all you need is an (Epia again is my preference, just due to low power use and integration) motherboard with RAM and a display unit... no drive just share it off the central server.
Too bad you probably don't live near me, I'd probably work for free or near-free just to play with a project like this (and/or have it on my resume).
clearly the relavant title is this one: imdb.com
I know it kept me from putting my electric shaver under the control of my PC.
What's wrong with the cyberpunk/borg look? Screw 3-5 inch diameter hooks about a foot or so down from the ceiling. Put one into every other stud. When you encounter a door, drill a hole and install chrome computer grommets on both sides of the wall, if you must.
You can easily add any wiring you need. Removing wiring might get more difficult after a while, but I say just leave it there even if you don't need it as it adds to the look.
Don't be paranoid about electrical wiring. Run dollar store extension cords, preferably also chrome colored, up into the wire paths and extend them with additional extension cords as needed to run power around the home.\
You may want a second set of hooks for sensitive signals like the hidden video cameras coming from your bedroom, or the infared trip wire feeds coming from the perimeter of your yard.
When I was in college we did somethng sort of like this but we just used push pins to hold the speaker and phone wire to the sheetrock. The hooks is a step up to the professional.
Well, I mean the professional borg anyway.
I'm mostly serious.. why are people so afraid to stand out and let their wires be seen? It's like every house has to pretend like this is still 1837 with technological improvements discreetly tucked away.
I installed steel roll doors behind the normal doors of my house. It looks normal from ourside, but sure as hell no one is coming in that way without considerable time and surprise. Of course, home security is as safe as its weakest link. Do like me, and build a stud wall behind every window. I put curtains and lights in there so it looks normal from the outside. Everyone keeps mentioning using effecient windows, etc- why have windows at all? (other than code, fire escape yeah, yeah) Windows let criminals in. They let light in when you want to sleep during the day. They let in lots more noise than a nice solid, insulated stud wall. Maybe you don't have to be as extreme as me, but we really need to start questioning our assumptions and have the balls to stand up to the social inertia behind doing thing the same old way. I know if you have an unelected city government watching you, otherwise known as a neighbourhood association, you may not have the option. Move into a super cheap abandoned home in the ghetto like me and you can do what you want. You'll need that roll door then for sure.