John Nye has added photos of the touchscreen Kiosk he recently installed in his kitchen. These are the units some of our reader recently purchased from eBay in the US. At around £240 landed in the UK they were excpetion value. John's system is running xLobby and with two sound cards is providing him with two seperate music zones all controlled from the touchscreen...
Part P of the UK building regulations is intended to reduce accidents due to bad wiring. The new Regulations that are due to come into force this year, will make it a criminal offence for un-qualified people to carry our electricial wiring work without having it tested and certificated to BS7671. Even as an individual doing the work in your own home...
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- This project is to address a major problem faced by many Home Automators, who are looking for a more intelligent way to monitor the status of their equipment throughout the home. In the past, I have struggled with monitoring Audio Visual Equipment status in various zones of the home. I used Smartlink probes hardwired into HomeVision, but when I added multi zone IR distribution via FirM, the system could not work within a multi zone environment...
Ken Watt has updated his website and re-published his tutorial on using the advanced features of an LD11 X10 module on a table lamp...
"First things first, take an LD11 (or LD10 I guess), a case for same and your lamp and get ready. You'll also need some flex probably as most lamp flexes are not long enough to allow good placement as well as fitting the inline module. Usually I'll take new flex from the socket to the case/LD11 and use the lamp flex up to teh lamp by just removing the plugtop"...
This link was posted on the mailing list this morning. It's a great read for anyone thinking of installing their own Home Cinema system. Although it's about a basement it can be applied to a garage or any other room...
"The basement doesn't have to be just a place to store boxes with things you are never going to use, but it can be used also as a great entertainment hideout. A home theater in basement is a really good match. The lack of sunlight and the isolation from outside life suddenly becomes an important asset.
I always wanted to have dedicated room for home theater for movies because I never watch TV. The whole idea to adjust my own time to the TV time is for me totally upside down. It is like getting a schedule from your doctor when you are allow to be sick.
After taking some measurements and looking at the unfinished basement from every corner I decided to divide it and build a whole new room"...
The existing heating controller is a 3 channel affair - Upstairs, Downstairs and Hot water. We will only require an interface to channels 1 and 2 as our hot water is supplied from the stove and not the central heating boiler.
We are happy enough to use the existing thermostats - downstairs there are 6 zones of under-floor heating with a stat in each zone controlled by motorised valves on the manifold. Upstairs the radiators all have TRVs.
Although we are using a dedicated hardware controller (HomeVision - which has proved utterly reliable since it was installed in July 1997), we also wanted to leave the existing heating timer connected so it is possible to easily use it again if the need arises...
Welcome to the Automated Home Wiring Guide. This guide documents the installation of the various wiring systems around our new "automated" home. Hopefully the information will be helpful to others faced with the same task, or provide inspiration to those considering it. I'm a firm believer that a picture can paint a thousand words so wherever possible I have included photographs. I hope you enjoy reading this and I'd love to hear from you if you have any comments or suggests (
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Powercord have the finest range of Curtain motors which can be used with all good quality corded tracks and poles. These are professional motors derived from Stage Curtain motors used in theatre stages around the world. We manufacture to the spec you require so please visit our website on www.powercord.co.uk and view the different options. We must stress that these are not the normal curtain motors you would find in a DIY supermarket. These are proper curtain motors that last. All spares are available and made in the UK for the last 38 years. Prices start at £400 inc vat for the base models. Please telephone our showroom on 02086683076 during the week between 8-30am and 4-00 pm GMT
Submission by Frank Mc Alinden - Recently I purchased some Smartlinc video and led Probes . The reason for purchasing the probes was twofold . Firstly nearly every night I have to check my hv flags to ensure the tv,s dvd,s are set correct as my non ha compliant family tend to to turn kit on manually at times and therefore my flags status are incorrect so the probes should solve this problem. Secondly I was asked initially by another HV/FirM User to build a port extender with stereo sockets on it for his video probes. The project has now taken a slightly different direction and a multizone probe controller is being developed to return the requested probe status to Homevision...
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A new range of advanced lighting control units has been launched by Polaron Controls. Aimed at homes as well as bars, restaurants, smaller shops and offices, Lightlink Compact dimmer racks can be directly integrated to offer seamless control with other home automation systems such as multi-room audio, home cinema and security systems.
They make use of the latest IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) technology, which removes the need for noisy chokes and provides dynamic short circuit, overload and thermal protection. Soft starting stops the nuisance of miniature circuit breakers tripping caused by initial current surges.
Housing four or eight channels, the racks can control incandescent/LV and mains voltage halogen lights as well as providing 1-10V output for controlling HFR fluorescent dimmable ballasts. DALI and DSI options are also available...
AzteQ Solutions and CableNet (HomeMaster) have joined forces to give end users and home builders a one-stop-shop Home Networking solution.
In today's domestic environment, there is an ever increasing demand for technical additions to the home infrastructure. Apart from the need to use, daily items such as microwave cookers, dishwashers and DVD players, the requirement for whole families to utilize computer technology and access the Internet is growing at a tremendous rate.
These additional needs are causing problems within the traditional constructed home setting, which normally only allows for TV, phone and electrical connections. For instance, parents and children alike have constant requirements for Internet access for on-line banking, e-mailing, homework, research and multi-player games. Furthermore, family arguments are often caused over who uses the printer, who can play music or watch a movie, unless each computer has its own printer, phone line and DVD...
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- Always wanted that expensive feeling of push button lights on/off switching/dimming, here's how I did it : first of all it required some fishing down of 2 extra wires (1 would do it as well but I wanted to adhere to some color coding standards)from the (existing) light bulb to the switch controlling it. If you can't get this done, check out the X10 micromodules - which are more expensive (and they don't have dimmers yet)...
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- Well it took a long time to get round to it; it was always one of those things on the list. But it's done now and it even works. So what did I do? Our central heating system is not typical and is also quite extensive so it looked as if I needed a custom solution. We have 6 separate zones: 4 for the heating and 2 for hot water (see the picture of the pumps)...
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- After moving into Orchard House, we soon realised how much you take little things for granted. In our previous house the Central Heating Controller had been in the kitchen and both my Wife and I frequently made use of the "+1 Hr" buttons for both Heating and Hot Water. In Orchard House however, the controller was upstairs inside the airing cupboard. Now it's not a big house, but that was still more of a walk than I thought was strictly necessary ;-) I considered relocating the Controller, but there were no easy cable runs for the Mains cables required. Having recently installed a Comfort alarm, I'd been considering what I could use the Digital Outputs for. Slowly I managed to put 2 and 2 together and get close to 4. I'd install some relays that could control the Heating (240V) on the Comfort Outputs (12V). A 12V cable from Comfort into the airing cupboard was much easier....
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- Over these last few months i have been considering which way to go with my lighting system. Currently all my lights are controlled via relays by Genesis(my alarm system). I must say it has worked quite well and its only because i would like a dimming function on my lights its being made almost redundant (still looking after external security lights)...
Submission by Keith Doxey - The cable marking system employed uses bands of coloured insulating tape to identify the different cables. It is much quicker than some of the adhesive tapes printed with numbers, and more rugged than writing on the sheath of the cable.
From past experience I have found that even when using a permanent marker the ink still gets rubbed off or becomes illegible due to handling or dirt getting on the cable sheath. An added advantage of using coloured tape is that the cables can be identified from across the room...
Using the mains power circuit for networking homes is nothing new, but a £100 PCI card due out in September could create a new surge of interest.
LANergy, the specialist in LANs over existing power wiring, demonstrated a so-called powerline networking card at Networks and Telecoms on Tuesday that will make the technology price-competitive against Ethernet for homes, small businesses and hotels. The company also demonstrated voice-over-IP over power lines...
I was interested to hear about this new switch from AEI Security. The idea of an internal PIR controlled switch seems so obvious (indeed these are readily available in the States - like everything else). The clever bit of this switch is that it doesn't require a neutral wire (like all those external PIR security lights for example). It can also be used with florescent bulbs as well as non-lighting appliances (fans etc). Here's a quote from AEI's website...
My good mate Darren has the "Daddy" of all Cable Testers. It's a Fluke something-or-other and it's amazing! It can ping IPs, generate network traffic, test bandwidth , tell how long your CAT5 cable is, how many metres down the cable the break is (if there is one) and even the date and time the cable was manufactured (ok...I made that last one up). The only problem with this hand held wonder is that it's the same price as a small farm in Donegal!...
The objective of the project was to combine excellent architecture with the functionality of modern technology. The starting point in the project was based on a ficiton that the future habitants of the house are two parents living with a disabled 14-year old son, carried by his wheelchair...
The Clipsal range of faceplates and modules are now available from Lets Automate. You can have up to 5 modules on a single gang faceplate and 6 on a double (TIP - you can buy cheap blanking plates to cover off the holes you don't need until later)...
I have finished the wiring of my new house! My good mate Keith Doxey came to stay with me for the week and managed the whole project. Keith also created the documentation of the "key" to the installation...
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