Custom Home

I’ve decided that I want to do a whole house audio and video system. And it will be a DIY installation. That’s a little bit outside my comfort level, but fortunately not much. The main difficulties are sourcing the equipment and understanding the various options in the marketplace.

Researching this stuff has actually been a blast. I’ve learned a lot, and I know there’s a lot more to learn before I can say I’m qualified to design and execute this. Fortunately I have a firm grasp on the basics.

I’ve also spent a good deal of effort on looking into home automation in the past couple of weeks. I’ve looked at a lot of hardware and software to make your home smarter. And like with the audio and video, there is a vast array of products from which to choose. But the home automation space seems a lot more open and accessible to DIY than the custom audio and video.

My home automation strategy is to use X-10 (or Power Line Control) devices throughout the house, with a PC to control them. I’m very intrigued by the built-in support FreeBSD offers for X-10 (there’s a daemon called xtend and a userland client called xten included in the default distribution). This would make it very easy to construct a web GUI to control various aspects of the house just by calling shell scripts that invoke xten from a web page. My thought is to have a home automation server (FreeBSD is quite stable and would be ideal) and a separate touchpad-based Windows machine (thanks to eddie_dane) that offers a handy way to browse the (very very fancy, with lots of DHTML) GUI.

My overall home audio/video strategy can be summed up by two words: pervasive and unobtrusive. I want the flexibility to map arbitrarily many sources onto arbitrarily many monitors. And the video fidelity will mostly not be critical except in the family room where I can accomplish the connections locally. Elsewhere, using digital RF modulators is the plan. I’ll map video sources (mostly cameras around the property) onto TV channels this way so they can be viewed throughout the house.

As I get more refined with my ideas, I’ll post some more detail, but for now, here’s some links that I found helpful. Actually, these links are coming from my link database, so as I add more links, they will appear here as well. Links will open in a new window.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 20th, 2002 at 9:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.