Episode: 217
Title: HPR0217: Linux Media and Home Automation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0217/hpr0217.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:09:07

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music
The following presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference held August 28th through
30th, 2008, is underwritten by Ex-Mission.
Since 1993, Ex-Mission has developed and supported connectivity, hosting and co-location services
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Set up an Ex-Mission account today at xmission.com.
Streaming and podcast hosting bandwidth for this and many other presentations at podcast.utos.org
has been provided by Tier 4.
The presentation entitled, Linux Media Security and Automation was presented by Branded
Beaty.
This talk will be on Linux Media Security and Automation by Brandon Beaty, who is a media
and automation geek, who has used Linux and OSS exclusively for over half his life.
Whether that means he's old and uses a long time or he just got out of high school, I don't
know.
He has worked on everything Linux from embedded systems to super clusters and has contributed
to numerous OSS projects, local Linux groups and software standards.
He is known locally for his media geekiness as a former president of SLOG and internationally
for his work with Linux Media Projects, including MythTV, developing the first HDTV support
in Linux and his large collection of Linux Media How-Tos.
In his spare time, he enjoys seeing sunlight and the last geek art of socializing with
non-geeks, which could be a talk in itself maybe.
So I'll turn the rest of the time over to Brandon.
All right.
So to start off with, if you have any questions, I'll throw out it, raise your hand, it's
a little bit more of an advanced class.
I say that because home automation does require a lot of tinkering.
There's going to be a lot of things that, when you go through your automation, you're
going to have questions.
So if you see something that you're not quite sure about now, ask it now, a three-second
question will save you five hours later, trust me.
So feel free.
I know that the first part of the lecture or the title said Linux Media, I ended up needing
to push that back to tomorrow's lecture.
I'll go over some of the media stuff in this, but I'm mostly going to try and stay focused
on what it's going to take to automate your home and what are the options when you go
through to actually do the automation in your home.
What's available right now, I should move to the next slide, because truthfully right
now automation in a home in general is a really mixed up environment.
Every company, there's probably a hundred of them out there, have decided to view with
their own way, and there's not a solution to actually integrate everything.
If you want to integrate everything, you'll realize that you're going to have to be creative
and do a lot of the thinking and putting everything together yourself.
So you have to get your hands dirty, like I was saying.
It's going to take some work, if you can always hire it out, there's a lot of companies
that will be glad to make a lot of money off of you and do it all for you.
A lot of the companies that do home automation, you'll find out strictly stay with lighting,
or they may have a couple of components to do, you know, hold home, audio distribution,
but they're not going to make when you hit the play button on the remote, turn off all
of the other music in the room, and break, turn your TV on, there's some companies that
do that, but you'll have to realize that every company has their own specific niche that
they fall into.
The automation is just automation.
We'll go into security panels, that's one of the first things that people usually want
to automate, and it's an easy way to do automation in Linux because tying into the security
panels, most of them have an RS-232 port.
So it makes doing a lot of, you know, walk through rooms, bring lights up, easier.
The contacts and relays, of course, every Linux system has a serial bus, so you can always
tie into that or buy external modules that'll let you, okay, you can buy a card.
I've got a name, there's not a serial for that.
Parallel?
Well, okay.
Yeah.
There's also network hubs that you can get that actually have serial relays on them and
I'll talk about that.
And of course, we'll go into video surveillance because that's really the most often question
I get is, you know, how do I do automation so that if somebody walks up to my house,
I can turn on my lights without putting the Home Depot motion sensors around, and of course
the hacking involved.
So lighting, first thing, don't build your own light switch.
There's a reason, there's the FCC part 15 rules.
I, even if you buy them, they're still, every once in a while you hear about a light switch,
even commercial, it's burned a home down, it doesn't happen often, but, you know, it
happens so don't do yourself.
Turn off breakers, I, and turn off more breakers than you think because you've got electricians
that will run two circuits to the same outlet and I for one have been shocked numerous times.
So I finally bought a power checker, you can just walk around with them, they're 10 bucks
at Home Depot, it'll save you a lot of time and print fingers and everything else.
The other thing is when you're doing automation, it's smart to at least have a friend or somebody
else that can work with you because a lot of automation requires running back and forth
between checking something on a system and actually checking a sensor.
So if you can work in teams, it'll save you a lot of time.
Even if it's, you know, your wife and all she's doing is waving her hands, works great.
And of course, with the lighting, you have to pay attention to load.
A lot of the dimmers for automation will not do over maybe 300 watts or 600 watts.
So when you get your chandelier, your 12 light chandeliers, it's way over the limit and you
can't dim them.
Sometimes you have to go strictly to switch based.
There are switch or dimmers that go up to 1,000 watts right now.
That's still not large enough for some of your larger lighting.
All right, so cheap technology is to do automation.
Of course, there's a proper, it's a nice wireless, okay, it's cheap.
It works for a lot of situations.
X10 has been around for a long time, I call it cheap, I had a bunch of X10, I threw out
a lot of X10.
There is a lot of failure rate.
If you don't have filters, people that are actually neighboring homes that may have X10
can turn your lights on and off, there's only 256 different combinations of identification
MAC addresses basically on X10 equipment and you have to manually set each one yourself.
So if you happen to pick A1 for your first light and your neighbor picks A1 for his light,
there's a good chance he'll be turning on and off your light.
The other problem is electric motors or power spikes that come through just normal electricity
from the power company or if you turn on a vacuum cleaner, it can turn your X10 lights on
and off.
It gets really knowing really fast.
IR, there's a lot of different IR lights where you can just buy one switch, it has a little
IR sensor and point the remote over and find those at home deep, but there are $20, $30
for the remote and the light.
So it's not that expensive and then there's a hybrid and the hybrid in stay on is fairly
popular right now because one, it's inexpensive and yes, sadly $40 is inexpensive, but it uses
both wireless and also the power lines.
So it will attempt to send the signal both ways and it actually has an acknowledgment.
X10 and all these others don't have any sort of acknowledgment to say yes, I got the
packet or to keep trying to rescind the information to turn on and off or to specific
level.
Mid range, you've got leviton, control 4 and light touch, leviton, they're about $80 starting
for a dimmer, control 4 retails for $100 a dimmer and light touch, I don't have any pricing
on them, they're another local company so I thought I'd give them a little screen time
and mention them.
There are a lot of the homes that you see in Purcell, for clothes I should say, you'll
go in and you'll see a light touch panel.
It's a fairly inexpensive system, let you do all the lighting, it's power line based
and it's fairly reliable too.
The high end technology, you've got HAI, home automation and Corp, that's about 150
a dimmer, Lutron, they're about 150 dimmer and Creston to control 6 lights, you have to
buy this panel that gives you your 6 zones and 16 presets and it's $1100, which if you
start thinking you have 30 switches in your house, it's going to get real expensive
real quick.
Thing to know about some of these is they don't always let you say go to light level 27 and
allow you to actually have multiple locations with presets, sometimes you have to come
through this box and click through which kind of defeats the point of some automation
because you want to be able to go in, hit a button or hit play and have the lights automatically
dim rather than walking over to a button and selecting each light, there are presets
so you can go through so you can hit one button but it still doesn't give you total control
and we're Linux people, we want full control over absolutely everything, so which one?
That was a Creston panel, so high end cost, 30 lights, $15,000, audio video integration
with the high end systems Crestons, you're looking at about $150,000 to, that includes
your home theater, all your bedrooms, getting video matrix switches, that's pretty much
as high end as you go, that's what the people making 6, 7 figures will install, security
system, that means all your switches, your motion sensors, your glass break sensors, people
in the high end will spend about $10,000, miscellaneous, that includes all the wiring, your
structure wiring, you want driveway sensors, if you want to pull out back to have some sort
of temperature sensor or be able to control the temperature from inside, so high end you're
looking at $225,000, yeah expensive, so let's go to mid range, 30 lights, $4,000, not too
bad, but it's still kind of a killer, audio video integration, you're still going to
do about $20,000, that includes maybe like a couple, 400 dischangers, your audio video
switches, projectors, everything that you're going to need to actually do all the audio
visual in your home, security, to do your house, you'll spend about $2,000, some of that
may mean you only do the window sensors on the first floor, you don't do the second floor,
you don't do every single interior door, which is great for automation because you know
when people are opening and closing doors, there's a lot of cool things you can do with
that, miscellaneous, $3,000, so $29,000, still a lot, but not too bad, next, the cheapest
cost, $1,400, this would be going the in-stay on route basically, your audio video integration
and a matrix switch, maybe a home theater PC, you know, something you put together yourself,
security system, $600, you know, that's just your basic couple of motion detectors, your
exterior doors, miscellaneous, there's a lot of miscellaneous stuff, wiring, connectors,
so about $4,500, still expensive, but unfortunately that's about as cheap as you can get.
So, what do I do? I basically think a lot of people should consider what I call the smart
Linux, Linux mid-range cost, which means get a bunch of in-stay on lights, get, you know,
build your own Linux PVR, get a matrix switch if you want to be able to send that signal
to different rooms, I should ask, how many people know what a matrix, video matrix switch
is? Okay, so a video matrix switch basically is you have inputs and outputs, and those can
be audio and video, so say a 4-4 audio video matrix switch is you have 4 inputs and 4 outputs,
which lets you take 4 devices, your PVR, your, say your cable box, a DVD player and a blue
ray player, and the 4 outputs you can have it running to, your theater, your master bedroom,
your living room, and your kitchen, and then you're able to select between each one of those
different sources and get any one of those in any one of the rooms. Video matrix switch
is start off about 1,500, but for a 4-4, you can go up to, say, a 16-16, which will run
you about $20,000. They're a great way to get your information from one place to the
other without having to have duplicates of everything, but there's also other ways you
can save that. If you do a Linux PVR like Myth TV, you can just have front-ends in each
of the different rooms, bring in all your cable channels over that, and Myth will stream
it out over your standard category 5 network cable, rather than, you know, 5 pair of structured
wires that you have to run. You can also do a lot of stuff with Myth wirelessly, so you
don't have to retrofit, and you can just put in like a 54G and you can still get all
of your television and everything streamed wirelessly, as long as you have a good router
with enough power in it. Security, $500, will actually buy you about 10 motion sensors,
40 window sensors, and 40 door sensors, and then another 100 bucks for the wire to run
all those. The smart thing is knowing where to buy stuff. If you're going to do home automation,
I highly recommend you go get a business license and you become your own integrator. The
reason is, some of the prices, when you go in, there's a company called Arlenco. You
can buy all the equipment, including speakers or video, you know, some of these devices,
for a third of the price of what you can get it on the retail market. So start your own
business. Speakers, if you want to do whole home automation or whole home audio distribution,
instead of paying $120 per pair, you're paying $40 per pair. You'll find a lot of companies
will run special certain months, certain things will be on sale. A motion detector at cost
is $12. If you go and buy it through somebody, they'll charge you $100 per motion detector
to install it. The retrofits of the wireless motion sensors are wonderful. The only downside
is you have to change batteries every year or two. If you can get in and do any structured
wiring, I highly recommend it. It's a little bit harder, but you've got the reliability
and you're not having to change batteries all the time. Okay, so miscellaneous, you know,
your connector, so you're about $7,500 to do a full automation of your whole home, which
compared to the other prices is pretty is a pretty good deal. So budget, how much can
you spend right now? Everybody has budget that, you know, I want to stick with in that.
The sad story is you probably won't and you probably won't be able to do what you want
for the price. So just kind of be aware of that. So if you can't meet your budget, what
can you do now and what can you add as you go along in the project? There's a lot of
things that can be added after. The most critical thing is, you know, with your security system
and any, if you're building a home or wire it, get category five wire everywhere in your
home, run all of your two wire or four wire for motion detectors beforehand before you
finish the basement. It'll save you a lot of time. If you're thinking about saving your
basement or finishing your basement and thinking about doing a home automation, do the home
automation on the first floor, then finish your basement. Even if it means putting your
basement off another year, you'll most likely be glad you did that in the long run. Is
it less expensive to do it yourself? There's very few things that smart people, geeks, can't
figure out that an integrator already knows how to do or somebody that puts in a security
system. I fixed many security systems that other companies have put in for people that
the wiring is bad. You'd be surprised on how much people end up paying in the quality
of work that they get out. So I'm saying, do it yourself. There's a lot of things that
it's really easy if you can turn a screwdriver and run a wire and read instructions. That's
about all you need. And of course, where can you cut your corners and save costs? There's
a lot of things like I say and you can add later. Okay, so how are you going to do this?
You want to hack in, you want to buy some switches, maybe you want to buy a system that's
currently out there and get things that don't work under it to work under it. A good example
is I brought some old, these are some really old automation devices. So this will actually
control everything in your house. It controls your lighting. It has input outputs on the back
for serial, relays, contacts. It also will display the different information about your
house on screen. Now, some devices will run Windows. Some will run Linux. Some will
run hybrid, windriver, embedded OS. If you can get any information online, a lot of stuff
for home automation is proprietary, but there's a lot that aren't. And finding out the ones
that aren't, if you really want to get in and hack and make it recognize who's walking
up to the door, you're going to want to go with a company that has open or standards that
you can reverse engineer, something that you can sniff on a wireless network. You need
to also know how are you going to interface with your different devices. Can I talk to
an IR, can I talk serial, RS232, can I talk IP, or do you have to use standard, are there
standards that you can actually use that pre-exist, that everybody's adopted, or are you going
to have to reverse proprietary information? And of course, the last thing is, can you monitor,
and what I mean by that is, is there a way to tap into the signal if it's, you know, serial
based, you can always get a serial scanner, you can see the ones and zeros, you can copy
the codes, and then you know what they are, and you can always send them back and do a replay
type situation. If it's IR, there's a lot of IR detectors that you can actually capture
the signal, you can build or buy devices under Linux, it'll send the IR signals out, and
IP, as long as it's not an encrypted stream of packets, you can always sniff it, you can
always see what they're setting in the different packets, and you can always do replay attacks
or modify things. Okay. So, basically, you need to get your hardware, you need your tools,
ethereal live shark, you need your programming. Nice thing about doing some of the automation
is, it's really easy to write one script, or that, say, does one specific thing, you can
make a call into that over web server with the lamp, trigger things, and actually have
it go back, maybe send signals out to a device, crash on, and tell it, hey, the light switch
went to this, and try and emulate the, either a door opening or light switch to basically
keep the state updated in your controller box, and I'll explain why in a minute. So, there's,
I'll mention something really quick. Let me see which slide is in there. Okay. The biggest
home automation software tools that are out there right now that I would say are, in the
Windows world, you have what's called lifewear. Disney interventions, they've got it that whole
thing, they put in what's called the house of the future, and the entire floor is going through
touching touch screens, changing light levels, playing around with stuff. Lifewear is built on the
Windows Media Center. Media Center was designed and developed to be the Windows platform, and then
everybody can kind of plug in all their different modules into it. The nice thing is, you will start
to see certain standards. Lifewear works upon, say, the Z-Wave, which is a wireless communication.
So, everybody has to talk the same standard in order to communicate. So, if you go with lifewear,
there's a lot of devices that you're going to be able to control. You won't have to deal with,
you know, IR, reversal, serial reversal, replays. You can do pretty much everything by IP. You can
query the entire environment, get a whole dump of all the information about every switch, every
device that's in there, know every state, and you can then go back and be able to set certain
states in there. The ones under Linux, there will be a presentation tomorrow on Linux MCE,
the way it works, unlike current Creston Control 4, is everything is actually on that Linux
box. But if you have, say, a Lutron system, and you change the lights in the Lutron, you will not
get the update on your Linux MCE. So, you'll bring up your current room, and I'll tell you the
lights off, and you're going, well, the lights on, and I hit play, and I think the lights off,
so it actually never dims it. So, you're going to have to figure out, am I going to create my own
entire environment, manage it myself, or am I going to try into one of the other environments?
And if you, and I highly recommend that you try and tie into one of the other environments,
unless you really want to spend several hundred hours creating your own automation environment,
that you manage all the states of all the devices, you set everything, basically, you have to create
what everybody's spent a couple of years doing. It is possible, you'll get exactly what you want,
you just have to realize it's going to take a lot more time. If you go with, say, Control 4,
or an AME Mac system, can you query individual devices? Creston, you can, but you need a developer's
IDE, and they will not sell it to just anybody. They are very limited on who gets it. So,
you can do lifewear, lifewear is really easy, you can do other Control 4, I won't speak on it,
I have Control 4 in my house, I actually have developed for Control 4, my own devices for my own
company, but there are ways that you can set absolutely everything you want. I will mention there
is a Google Summer project that somebody happened to put Wireshark on the network when he was
controlling his Control 4 box and started realizing, hey, this is all XML, and he actually found
that just about everything that you would ever want to control and Control 4 is able to be
controlled over packets and sending XML to the device. So, that's kind of a hackers dream,
it's Linux, there aren't as many devices under Control 4 as there will be for lifewear,
and I'll explain why in a minute.
So, how do some of the different devices communicate? Well, lifewear uses
UP&P heavily, if you put in a router, it will act, lifewear and windows, media center,
we'll notice that you added a router. Some of the routers that are coming out will actually
hook right to your television, you can stream YouTube, you can check news feeds,
actually right from your router. Next year has some links, this has some, they're actually really
cool and they're getting to the point where they can do 720p, they're hoping to do 1080i and 1080p
really soon, which opens a lot of doors. XML streams, is there a way that you can capture
data that's going over the network? Can you plug into it? Can you write a plug in?
Crestron is kind of more of a plug in type system. And other, and what I mean by other is,
if you know somebody that works for a company, you're probably going to find out internal things,
or you may just happen to get, you know, an SDK. So, when you're trying to figure out which
system you get, who you know is going to play an important role because it may save you
the cost, you may get discounts on hardware. You may have help when you run into problems,
you may have access to tools that other people don't. And if the company goes bankrupt,
there's a lot of things that can happen. One, you're replacing everything. There are a lot of
home automation companies that have gone bankrupt, and will go bankrupt, or two, you may be able
to pick up a lot of hardware, really cheap. They may open everything when they go out, or,
you know, the whole project, or you may just get all the tools, things to think about.
Master guest, this is what I was explaining. I jumped ahead of myself. Do you want to do your whole
automation environment, or do you want to try and interface with somebody else's current
environment? What I will say is on guest, meaning you actually integrate with somebody else.
There's a lot of things that automation equipment won't do. One of the things that I wanted was when
I went away, I wanted to have a predefined schedule of, you know, turn these lights off, or random
light on and off and choose between these five lights and turn it on and off during these
certain times, leave it on for a certain amount. The schedulers in automation are a joke. You'll
hate it. You can write a five minute script that is 100 times smarter than anything you'll get
in automation software to do random things or do specific things. Talk about reverse engineering.
You're going to have to write code, test it. Testing is a big thing. What happens when the power
goes out and comes back up? Is your environment able to detect where everything's at, or does it
have to wait for the next button to be pushed before it actually knows what state it's at? That
becomes a real big issue if you're ever out on vacation and the power goes out or you have a
brown out, or you're just doing, you know, testing if the system happens to crash or reboot.
How difficult is it going to get back into the environment that you wanted? And the biggest thing
in the end is you want to be able to enjoy it at the end. So just keep that in mind. Okay, so
here are some of the HII is highly proprietary. They have some really cool things. They have speech
recognition recognition. So you can say, you know, how turn on the lights in the master bedroom.
And it knows what you're saying. HII is the furthest along for that type of technology. You've
got Lutron. One other thing I'll mention when I see Lutron right here is one of the big,
there are IBMs and Microsofts in the automation world that have more patents than you would ever
imagine. And there are huge patent wars. If you hit a dimmer, Lutrons are the only ones that are
able to blink as it increases the volume or increases the brightness. They have sued everybody that
has put anything out there to do the same thing. You know, changing colors on LEDs. The LEDs
down certain sides, all these really stupid things get patented. And there's a lot of patent
grilles that really have stifled innovation, have patented things, but it's been 15 years later,
and we still haven't seen anything. And that's why if you want to do some of the automation,
you're going to have to do it yourself because other companies will not be able to do what you
want to do because of patents. So OSS tools. And stay on has a huge collection of open source tools.
It's very easy to interface with. HII has a few tools for specific things. And the reason is HII
works a lot with disabled people. And the disabled, there's different organizations that actually fight
for rights and standards, and the government leans really highly upon these organizations.
So when they request things, the government has had in the past a really good,
or has put out really good support for forcing companies like HII to actually open up specific
things that they deal with disability, such as the tools for opening doors, controlling lights.
But if you get into the more specific things like the voice recognition, you won't be able to touch
any of that in HII. Crestron has some tools that you can interface with. Crestron goes into a lot
of schools. I have no doubt it's all over the campus here. And a lot of the students have to do the
programming. Each room has to be programmed, and it takes maybe five to ten hours to program
every room if they're unique. And because of that, a lot of schools want open source tools,
and they're writing open source tools and interface. Control for, there's been apps that are released,
they sit on a web server that let you turn everything on and off in your house. It queries the
entire environment, automatically generates a list of all your devices, and you can go and
click all your states. So if things like that exist, you know it's going to be easy to either write
your own tools or interface. Control for, and their new version came out with something called C4
Lua, which is just Lua. So you can actually have your own programming language and write any driver
you want, which is pretty cool. And then of course, life where, just because it is a Microsoft
technology, but they want every, they're trying to really get their foot in the door, and because
of that, a lot of things are open right now, and there's a lot of things that you can create.
X10 was, everybody was really familiar. If you had X10, you probably bought one of the little
firecracker devices that plugged into your cereal and let you control all your X10. So Mr.
House, Pluto, Linux MC, all were able to do those. And I will say really quickly, Mr. House
became Pluto, and Pluto gave out about, I heard yesterday from Barry. You see here?
No, he's not. He's doing the Linux MC. They gave away 90% of all of their automation, which is now
become Linux MC, and they gave that away to the open source community. And stay on. Linux MC,
can handle and stay on. So you know, there's already tools out there that are going to be OSS
friendly, and there's a lot of tools on source, source for controlling the end stay on. Z-Wave.
Z-Wave is a wireless technology, and so is Zigbee. They compete competitors. I'll show you really
quickly the difference between the two. But Mr. House and Linux MC work heavily with Z-Wave.
Zigbee, there's the Google Summer of Code Project and other devices or other things out there.
Both these are an open standard, but a lot of the companies are trying to close them off,
and the reason is there's absolutely no security. A lot of companies say, you know, our devices
are secure. You can't get into the system unless you're registered. It's not what they say,
unfortunately. You can go buy a Zigbee radio and see every single packet, and you can replay
events, and you can do all sorts of things. So if you're everything about doing automation,
also realize that you're opening up your house likely to anybody that wants to cause problems.
So Z-Wave, Intel is backing at Panasonic, DSC, and LifeWare. There's over a hundred other
companies, partners that are in the LifeWare or in the Z-Wave technology. A frequency 908,
4.2 in the U.S., has a range of about 100 feet, and 9.6 kilobytes, or kilobits per second,
to 40 kilobits per second. Not fast. So how about Zigbee? Not much better. So there's about 30 plus
companies, Simmons, AMX, and Control 4 are the biggest ones that I'll mention here today.
There's multiple frequencies depending on what device. Control 4 uses 2.4 gigahertz
that can be problematic. They do have different channels that you can select, and there is one
channel that is outside the range that routers use. So most people end up using that. The range
is a little bit better. You've got anywhere from 33 to 246 feet, and bandwidth is slightly better,
20 kilobits, 40, and 250 on the max end. And those, I should say, the frequencies relate to the
speed. So 2.4 gigahertz is where you get 250 kilobits. So what can you use the wireless for? Well,
you can use it for lighting, contact relays, extenders, and that's pretty much it. You're not going
to be doing video, you're not going to be doing audio, and you're not going to be surfing the internet
on it. IP, well, this is better. You can do video, you can do audio, you can do all your lighting,
you can do your security. IP, of course, the only thing you can't do are serial IR and RF,
different technologies. So IP is the way to go if you're going to be hacking your own automation
system. Serial, it's still critical because it's how you tie into a lot of the security panels.
Your receivers, the high-end receivers, some of them are coming out doing IP, but a lot of them
still just do serial. And that becomes key. So if you have a remote like this, you're either,
you know, hitting TV, turning it on, hitting my receiver, turning it on, everything's manual,
or you can go out by one of these for 50 bucks. Yeah. And you can actually program
you know macro. So you can control 15 different IR signals. Still the downsides of both of these
is you cannot control something in a different room or you have to point it at the devices.
So this one has, you know, multiple IRs that shoot off in different directions. They're
high power, so hopefully they bounce off all the wall. These still will not learn every IR signal.
I use this for a while and I actually captured signals from my IR keyboard so that I could,
you know, bind play to my myth box to make myth play. There will be some keyboards that you
can't learn IR signals on. This is a control for remote. It's RF or not it is RF. It's Zigbee.
And the nice thing is about some of these technologies. This is a control for dimmer.
It has Zigbee in it. So if you have a remote and you have a bunch of these in your house,
it is a mesh network. So it will jump from one to the other. And the nice thing about control for
pressed on some of the different ones is they take care of all the binding. So you can actually say,
I have a room. And in this room, I have a receiver and I have a TV and I have X, Y, Z.
What you click on the TV, it shows you all the outputs for your specific model. Well, you say I
have this type of model TV, this type of receiver. So you click on your TV, shows you all the outputs.
You click on, say, the audio output, the optical. You click on it and the bottom pane out pops all
of your different devices that are in your project, in your home. And you can just drag and drop
that in the receiver. And it knows exactly what it's going to have to change on what device in
order for you to say you come to like TV, hit the TV button. It takes care of setting absolutely
everything, which starts to get really nice because you can't do that with your other emotes.
Weather stations, you're still controlling those by serial. Your display devices,
some TVs, a lot of new ones have serial in them. None of your TVs really have IP and let you
control it by IP. So what you end up doing for a lot of televisions is the companies will have
little ports on the back that have IR transmitters. So you take one of these wires from one of these
devices. It's usually at every TV and you stick it out on the front of the TV and it has self-sticky
tape and you basically put it over the IR sensor. And that's how you turn your TV on and off.
And it doesn't know the state. Higher in TVs will have serial. So you can actually query the
state, turn it on and off, turn it to a specific channel without a lot of problems. You run into a
lot of IR signals. Don't always get there. It can be problematic. Dischangers. Dischangers
are anywhere from 200 to $500 for like a 200 IR dischanger where you have to do everything by IR.
About $500 for a 400 Dischanger that's serial based that lets you go to a specific movie.
And companies like Crestron and Control 4 will have all of that built in. So you put in your
disk. It'll actually read the tag identification. Okay, I can't think of it right now. Send it back
to the automation. It'll do the look up for all your movie information. Populate its own content.
So you can actually take one of these hit videos, say show me all the videos and scroll through
this. And on the display you see all your movies and you can hit play. And all you've done is just
put the disk in the the changer and gone from there. All right, your thermostats are still all
pretty much serial based. If you want to control the temperature in your house. A lot of companies
have their own wireless one. So you just pop your current one off, pop on a new one, wireless,
it integrates the control system or you can create your own custom circuit. IR, you still
you're planning on doing any automation for blinds. They're all IR, your TVs and a lot of the
remotes. You may be using IR. Sealing fans are always RF. Blinds can also come in RF.
TV, a lot of some of the newer TVs are going away with IR and going to RF. That makes automation
a little bit more difficult because nobody really creates an RF transmitter. So
luckily too many haven't done that. It's something that if you go out buying a TV and it's RF
only, just be aware that it may be difficult to integrate into a control system.
Resources. So you want to pick a technology with potential if it's a life or a long term project.
Will Intellectual Property holders help or slow you down like I was mentioning earlier?
Will, you know, if you release a tool under, you know, GPL and it's one that contains a patent
that Luchon has, are they going to slap you with a DCMA? Are they open protocols that you can
interface Z-Wave, Zigbee? Are they Linux hack or friendly? Oh, also on you, you can't dim that
way. We own that method. I will mention under life wherein some of the others, you may not have
if it's kind of a plug-in system, they can't guess what every type of option will be on every
type of device. So you may only have a low medium and high. So you may not be able to get the exact
light level that you want with some plug-in systems. It's just something to be aware of.
There's plenty of information online. You just have to look for it. You just need to know that
that can be something that can come back about you. Okay, make lists. What do you want to control now?
What will you want to control in the future? It's always fun to at least throw in one geek project
when you're doing it. I personally, I've integrated my house so as I put motion sensors in every room,
every door has a sensor on it, even closets. When I have kids, I figure I have two girls and they
fight over who stole their clothes. I know who was in the house when the door opened and closed.
But I have motion sensors like I was saying. So at night, I actually never touch a light switch.
I walk around the house, all my motion sensors. When I installed it, I knew where they would be
pointing and I mapped everything out carefully so they're and tipped them in such ways. So there's
no double coverage and they mark specific zones. So I can walk through as I walk down a hallway,
hallway lights will turn on depending on the time of night. If it's two a.m., it's only going to
turn it on to 30 percent instead of maybe like seven o'clock at night when you need the full brightness
just to kind of even things out. Cost, some people say, you know, if you automate your lights,
you save money. No, not really. These light switches are about five watts each and if you have
30 of them, that's 150 watts. Not really. And that's the other thing. Compact fluorescent are
enemies to automation. They're tough to dim. You can get dimmable ones. The life is questionable.
I personally don't like compact fluorescence because of the color. I don't like the flicker
in them. And their health hazard is if act one actually breaks, it has mercury in it and you're
supposed to open the windows and leave the room for a day and if you look at the warnings and they're
they're just something that they're not automations friend. One thing to know within
contestants, if you dim them just by, you know, 20 percent, you will actually increase the
life of it maybe 40, 50 percent. If you only use a light at 50 percent, you may get two or three
times the length out of the bulb and also not having the heart on, heart off. You will find that
some lights that are were made badly will burn out faster and other ones that were made really well
will actually last many, many years, far longer than you ever would have expected. In my house,
I had five go out within the first week but I can also blame that new house. I had like 100 new
light bulbs and I haven't replaced a single light bulb since I moved in besides the the ones
that first went out. So I think it's pretty good. All my lights are slow on, slow off, especially at night
if when I'm walking around the house, it's not like get on 20 percent. It's, you know, slowly ramps
up and down, which... No, the, the tough thing with LED light bulbs is they still don't have
the same amount of lumens as you get. A standard say 60 watt light bulb will have say 600 lumens.
The LED lights replacements only have about 1 to 200, 300 if you're lucky. So right now I will
switch from incandescent to LED once I can get the same number of lumens out of it. LEDs also,
you know, they're more directional and in some situations you don't want directional light.
LEDs were better for spot. Yeah, they're getting better. I'm still, I personally
am going to wait a number of years until I spend the money. They're really expensive too and
I've had a hard time justifying it. What's that? Yeah.
There's also some other technologies besides LED that are coming out that are really interesting.
Did you have a question? No. Okay. So I think I would recommend waiting at least another
a couple of years if you want to look at LED unless you really want to be on the bleeding edge,
but you may find your money a little bit mismanaged. That's, that's just my personal opinion.
So as I was mentioning earlier, how do you distribute audio and video? Oh yeah, I'm going to have to
move quick. Okay, so I've mentioned you have the matrix switches or you can do, you know,
a different media box in each location. Use method TV. You can have a backend that stores all your
movies and you can watch everything remotely. Radio, if you want to do distributed radio,
you need to look with a company that actually creates their own say 16 channel amp and you plug,
you, they usually have like eight inputs and 16 outputs. You can send it to sift or eight
different speakers because you've got stereo. And if you want to do this distributed audio,
just about every automation company has their own device that they work with. Some of them will
be radio. Some of them will do internet radio. Look around to all the different ones.
Some devices, you can actually pull up IP cameras on this now. So if somebody knocks on your front
door, you can click through and look at an IP cam. I've hacked mine to actually bring up analog cameras.
So yeah, I mentioned some of this earlier.
Okay, so weather stations. Why I say what not to do? Don't do anything based on weather unless
you just want to see status. If you have a dream about lowering the blinds or, you know,
turning off the sprinklers, let the sprinkler system do it. It works well. I want to integrate my
sprinkler system, but the cost of it is ridiculous and it's just not as reliable. So you have to
think what is actually going to be reliable. I want to, I had some windows in my living room that
I get the sun in every night so I thought, you know what? I'll hook up something that, you know,
if it's five o'clock, then lower the windows and bring it back. Well, after finding out that
just a, basically 10 foot by 10 foot blind is $5,000 for the motorized ones. And then finding that
I'd have to rewire because they use proprietary stuff. So I'd have to do my own controls
on circuits that basically try and tie into theirs. And then the fact that when I thought, okay,
well, I'm still fine until I found out that in a 10 mile an hour wind, you've got to lift it up.
And I'm in Saratoga, we get 50 mile an hour winds fairly regularly. So I was like, okay,
well, I'll put in a weather station. Then I started investigating the weather stations and they're
just not reliable enough. And it was something that I really wanted to automate. It was going to be,
my kind of geek project. And I had to basically abandon it. But if you want to look into it,
one wire is what you want to look into. It's supported under Linux. There's a lot of tools out
there. It's called one wire because you've got one wire that runs up that does all the communication
through. So I've only got a few minutes. So I'm going to quickly, I'll show you,
okay, just some of the different technologies. So we've got pressed on stuff that I was talking
about. You know, you've got to plug into all their ports. It may not have all the outputs that
you want. So a lot of this is finding out what equipment you want before you actually do your
integration. And then seeing if everything's going to work together and you may have to jump
companies if you can't do what you want. AMX, these are interesting things. Some of these
keep ads if you want one in every location. You'll find some companies have tons and tons of
different designs where, like control 4, you get this and their switch looks the same. And then
they've got a three button with three buttons or you have a six button that has six buttons.
That's it. You don't get sliders or anything else. Lutron owns a lot of the patents on the
sliders. That's why you don't see anybody else doing it. Some companies have
intercom systems, pressed on as it control 4 doesn't. Other things to consider. I personally
did voice over IP phones and asterisk in every room. The phones are, you know,
60, 70 bucks and you can do a lot more with that and hacking than you could ever do with
putting in intercom in each room. So HAI, they do, like they said, a lot with disability. So you've
got your dimmers, your lamp modules, your switches, your scene stuff. They give you plugs
that, you know, you can plug just about anything into some of them are dimmable. Control 4s,
like I said, these are their products. That's it for lighting. They're audio video. They do,
Control 4 does a lot more in audio video. They actually sell their own stuff. These are, like,
you can buy a multi tuner that has multiple FM stations. You can get ethernet speaker points
where you can just plug an ethernet cable and stick your own amplifier on there and get audio
to any room. It's great for retrofit if you want to do home audio. And then, here's like a
Sony video switch, and I'll just show you what one of these looks like. So you have basically
all your audio inputs and outputs for your different zones. And I can't read. Okay, so the source
one source too. So this has eight sources or twelve sources. And then you've got wiring out
to all the different zones. I won't mention two real quick. A lot of just, you can do just about
anything over category five wiring. You can do audio, you can do video, you can do your IR. So
if ever in doubt, just run one or two cat fives to a room and you can use it for almost anything.
Somebody's made a device it. You know, it talks ethernet between them. It does power over ethernet
two at times, but you can still send video over ethernet and audio over ethernet. So.
What do you mean between the wiring choices? Yeah, there is. The longer you run the wire,
the more benefit it comes to actually turn it into digital before you transmit it with the cameras
that I was going to mention. I mean, this is a 100-foot strand of just regular analog. I can show you
pictures real quick. So. Oh, where is it? Oh, here we are. So if I click on
that, which one is it? Let's try the other one. Okay. Oh, that should be it.
All right. This was working in there. Video quality. Oh, there it was for certain.
Yeah, I'd say if you're running over 100 feet, you need to look at turning it digital before you send
otherwise you start losing quality. If you're doing like automated or distributed audio,
don't get the cheap wire. Go get the ones that are actually rated. There's a reason it's rated.
Some of the just clear coat wire for speakers puts off fumes if there's a fire. It also goes
bad within a year or two. The structured wire, you know, you may be paying double the cost, but
browser crashed. It's worth it. You also still need a figure that in 10 years, 10 to 20 years,
you'll want to replace all your audio wiring, which makes a big difference for how do you install it.
Always make sure you've got access panels if you can. So this camera, you notice, it's still
relatively quick for a pickup. And it's also, you know, the clarity is really clear. Firework is
to show you.
I wonder how I can emulate this.
What does it? Close caption, CCTV.
Most analog cameras, for instance, are
all right. Where am I going to find it? These cameras, this one in this, this is 640 by 480. This is
1280 by 1024. Actually, this will probably work as good as anything.
Well, actually, I got a better idea.
So that's the type of quality that you'll get with an analog camera.
It's not very good. You get a lot of blotchiness. These are all interlaced. The longer you run the
cable, the more problems you have. A good camera. I've got some that, you know, there's several
hundred dollars, a couple hundred dollars that actually do, you know, zoom. You can control the focus
that have IR on them. And it's still not anywhere near the same quality that you can get from a
network camera. This one's indoor only. This is outdoor. A couple things I'll mention really quick
with the security cameras is one thing you want to get as wide of an angle as you can. If you can
get fish eye, it's all the better. A lot of the cameras are designed to have a focal view of about
10 feet wide, 20 feet away. And if you're putting these up on your house, you can't really see
around or see right below it or you're putting them all over. My house, I have 13 cameras and
there's still a couple spots that I can't cover. Yeah. And that's why I've started looking into,
let's come apart, these because if you look, the lens on it is curved. So you actually get more than
say 60 degrees of an angle. You can get up to 120 or wider. If you're doing outdoor cameras,
this one actually is a pan tilt zoom camera. It's completely static. What it does is, as I was
mentioning, it's high, it has a 1280 by 1024 if you take the whole picture. But if you set it for
640 by 480, it digitally just looks at different areas of the picture, corrects from the
the lens shift and everything. On the, if you're going to be doing,
boy, I'm about 30 minutes short on my presentation. I'm just going to show you how to do
set everything up. If you're interested in setting up security cameras, come talk to me after,
I'll explain some of it. Yes.
It's pretty close.
Yeah, thanks. I shouldn't have mentioned that. I'll take questions here real quick. And if you have
other questions, you can come always come up later. Any questions? All right.
Yeah, this is access. Access is pretty well known for their, they produce really good cameras.
They're also really expensive. This camera is, I think, 2, 250. This one is about 700.
Your analog cameras, this one, I shopped around. I was going to show you. If you
on analog cameras, I'll get to that one second. Let me jump back. If you're going to do analog,
the thing to know is you'll buy tuner cards that look like this. So it's basically just BTTV chips
and it'll say maybe eight port, eight captures or some of them will say 16 port, 120 captures.
I got one of these cards. I am not happy with it because what happens is you start to add up
multiple cameras. As long as you have, it has four chips that each do 30 frames a second
hence the 120. If you start stacking multiple cameras on the same chip, you can get four per chip,
which is how you get 16. Your frame rates go from 30 frames a second. You add one camera,
you put two on it, you actually go to about seven frames a second. You add a third camera,
you go to three frames a second. You go to four cameras, you're about two frames per second.
Then the other thing is if you've got some of these chips, if your cameras aren't synced up
exactly, you'll get interlacing. So you actually have to wait a second between capturing. So your
frame rate on four cameras is actually less than one per second. That takes a huge impact.
I don't like it and that one second doesn't always work. Whereas you can take some of these
access network cameras and capture 1280 by 1024 at 30 frames a second. If you're going to do less than
say eight cameras, I would recommend going network based. You don't have to deal with running wires
back to the card on every run. Your video quality will be better. You maybe only have to run it
in and plug it into a hub in the network or hub in your attic rather than having to string every
single cable back to a location in the basement. Other things to note on cameras. If you get any
that have a plastic lens, I'm just going to bring one. Let me see. I'll show you one real quick.
These dome cameras are kind of nice because you think you can't tell which way it's pointing,
but if you look at it closely, you can see which way it's pointing and they're also plastic.
So after about five years, it's going to kind of turn junky. That's why if you go with something
that's glass, this has glass on it. This is called a bullet camera ish.
And it has IR on it. So different IRs will send out anywhere from 20 feet to 100 feet.
Some people prefer to get regular cameras without IR and put IR spots in their yard.
The benefit of that is the bugs get attracted to IR. Also, if you know I have to clean mine
are mostly all this. I've got some dome. I've got some of these. I have to clean these
every two or three months because you'll get a fine layer of dirt on there from storms humidity.
And when the IR turns on since the IR is right by the capture, you just get white because it hits
the dirt and reflects back into it. I still like these just because I didn't run any wiring to put
IR spots all over my yard. And I'm really not too disappointed. A lot of people complain that
spiders are always building the nest. I have, what is it, seven IR cameras on the outside and I
haven't had a single problem. I just have to keep the dirt off of them. I get bugs every once in a
while that fly or spiders that crawl over. But I haven't had a lot of the problems that a few people
complain about. These, you know, this sends the video and power over the same cable, which is nice.
The downside is you have to do the home runs. The network cameras, both of these do power over
Ethernet. So if you have a power over Ethernet switch or you can also get power injectors.
It makes things a lot easier. You can actually also tie in directly to one of these. You don't have
to say go through ZoneMinder. I'll show you ZoneMinder real quick. ZoneMinder does motion.
You can hook all your analog cameras up to it. You can do all the networks. So
set up pretty quick. You'll click add, which gives you say this number two. You select, you know,
is it, you give it a name. You tell it is it a local or using a capture card or is it a network.
What type of mode you always want, you just want to monitor it. You want to do capture the video
when there's motion. You always want to record it. You want to record it plus tag when there's
motion or just do nothing. You can set how many maximum frames at different times. And then,
you know, if it's a network camera, you specify the IP, you specify the location to get the video
image. If it's a capture card, you put depth video zero and you select which channel it's on.
Both of them you set the resolution and that's pretty much it.
If you go to a camera, the first thing you have to do is you have to set up a zone.
So it brings up the camera image. You can click on different corners.
So you can, you know, if you only want to track certain areas,
you can, you know, build a region. Like if I just wanted to watch or look at the door,
I'm not going to be able to hold that. That goes off the screen.
Again.
So the zone reminder does have a nice GUI. The zone reminder can be set up so when it detects stuff,
it can send signals out to X10 devices or to your own custom scripts. So you can say, you know,
if there's motion in this area, notify my Crestron system that something's happened and
flash the lights. Let's say going back to that, you can choose your preset the best.
If you choose the fast, it just does percentage of area. If you go to best and actually
tries to detect regions, blogs as they call it, and you can set all the information here,
you can add more points if you need, you know, more points to click on.
And the best way to set these up is you get somebody to far location. You click,
let me get out of this, force alarm, which forces an alarm situation.
And you have people move, you're like, okay, thanks, you can cancel the alarm.
Then you go back into, well, the resolution is being difficult. Anyway, you can actually go back in
and look at all of your frames. I really wish I could do this.
Oh, here we are. So here's a list of all the events.
So this will replay it. This is when I was messing around with stuff earlier. It looks like.
If you click on stills, it will highlight the frames in red. Actually, I don't have it turned on.
Normally, it'll highlight the frames. Oh, here we are.
So here it's detecting things that have changed. And if you can click on stats,
up pops a window that says, hey, I noticed pixel brightness difference of 66, 43% of the frame
was moving. Once I filtered it, I got this. So basically, you have somebody at the back moving
as much as you can. You find out what these values are. Shrink them down just a little bit more.
And that's how you properly calibrate your different zones. You can add multiple regions in one
picture. If you have something further off and you want it to be more sensitive versus something
that's closer, there's a lot of time that it takes to get these set right, especially if you're
outdoors because cloud cover will come and it'll create false events. So do realize that there
is quite a bit of setup that has to be done. Or you can go and purchase, you know, your pre-made
windows has a lot better choices for motion detection than Linux does. This Linux motion
detection does not work if you have pre-programmed handheld zoom cameras that are always moving.
This won't work with it. Windows has software that does. There is software on them that
tries to detect movement. I haven't played around with it. I actually just picked up this camera
last week and it has that feature and I haven't played around with it. So unfortunately, I can comment.
Anyway, any other questions?
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to CARO.NAC for all of her community.