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Project #2: Control4 Home Automation

Background:

Danny lives in a 3-story 1700s-era New England farmhouse (complete with barn) in Connecticut with his wife and four kids.

Danny’s home was, in many ways, the epitome of the digital home. Every room was wired with multiple broadband-connected Ethernet connections (as well as numerous Wi-Fi access points distributed around the house for whole-house coverage). Seventeen PCs and Macs were distributed throughout the house, including a “computer lab” for Danny’s four teen and preteen kids and for co-workers visiting Danny’s home office.

The main home theater included a 108” projection TV and a future-looking 14.1 surround sound system (designed with a consult from Dolby). DirecTV was distributed to TVs and DVRs throughout the house, and several media center PCs, an Apple TV and multiple DVD and VCRs were connected to HDTVs throughout the home, as were gaming consoles. Danny even had an outdoor “drive-in” theater set up for summer parties.

The home also included a lot of “point solution” automation and sensor systems – things like motion sensors, lighting controls, temperature sensors, driveway occupancy sensors and the like. There was even a cellular signal regenerator mounted on the roof (since replaced by a Verizon Wireless femtocell attached to his Internet connection). You can think of this as 10-years worth of accumulated X10, proprietary wireless, and other gadgets sent to us for review and/or testing at one time or another. These are too numerous to mention, but include a whole bevy of weather checking gear.

Despite all of these devices (and many many thousands of dollars worth of wiring and related equipment), Danny was still missing several things in his “wired” home:

• A truly whole-home audio system (as opposed to point-to-point wireless speakers systems that he already had installed).
• A video distribution system that took video from sources in one location (for example, the home theater) and sent them to TVs and displays in other rooms.
• A video surveillance capability that put remote cameras’ video up on the TV screen or on the PC screen (seems frivolous until you find yourself on the third floor of a colonial farmhouse and hear a car pull into the driveway).
• Even something as simple as an intercom system to keep the kids from yelling for each other every five minutes across three floors and 5,000 sq. ft.

But the biggest missing element was this: an overarching control system to take all of this “technological clutter” and to integrate it into a system that everyone in the house could use, from any location, at any time. He was also missing a system that could monitor the status of all of the disparate electronics in his home, and provide a mechanism for managing energy usage. In other words, Danny’s home needed a brain.

Editorial Disclosure: It’s hard to talk about such a project without making it sound like an advertisement. In many products we try, we have the luxury of swapping out one vendor’s solution with another vendor’s on a regular basis to avoid bias. You can’t really do that with an installed hardwired whole home solution. The fact we’re writing about this at all means that it works and is something we’d heartily recommend.

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