Whole House announcements?

[jjsmd]

I was wondering what would be the easiest way to implement whole house announcements? I really do not feel like pulling wire all over the house , but I may have to.

Has anyone played around with any kind of wireless audio? would that work?

Joe

[Rupp]

Joe,
There was a good howto posted one time where the user used computer speakers around the house connected to 2 of the unused wires in his phone line. It spoke of actually tapping into the wires and adding a speaker jack to the phone outlet so you can simply plug in the speakers to the phone jack.

Here's one of the links but there was another but I can't find it.

http://www.hometoys.com/htinews/oct0...gmatic/mp3.htm

[MBenzo]

Here's a couple threads that may be of interest:

http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=100877
http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=101234

[jjsmd]

Thanks for the replies.

The extra wires on the phone line is a good idea. I do have a slight problem because I have a panasonic pbx phone system, so all phones are wired as home runto a wiring closet.

I would have to use the extra wires in the phone next to HS to connect to the wiring closet and from there connect to all the individual rooms.

I suppose there is no problem connecting all the wires in the wiring closet into one jack and then connecting that to the HS jack?

Joe

[jrfuda]

Another technique is to use 900mHz wireless speakers. These can be bought for $40 - $120 a pair, and - usually - each speaker is powered and can be used independantly (so you can use one pair in two different rooms). To use them, you'd connect the speakers' transmitter to your audio output on your soundcard. You then place the speakers whereever you want and plug them in (or power them with batts).

You can have a singal transmitter send signlas to multiple speakers, so if you wanted to cover 4 rooms, you could by 2 pairs and use just one transmitter.

You can go even further by putting each speaker's wallwart on an appliance module and use some scripting or the speakeasy plugin (If it supports zones via X10 modules) to switch speakers on and off, thereby only having specific speakers playing at a specific time.

If the SpeakEasy plugin supports it, I'm going to use a simialir setup, using a combination of wired and wireless speakers.

[HomeTech]

900mhz interference

I did the 900mhz speaker route it worked great untill the local electric company installed wireless meters in our devlopment now I get static burst of data often.

A lot of utilities are upgrading to these wireless 900 mhz downloadable electric service meters.

FYI

[jrfuda]

A lot of utilities are upgrading to these wireless 900 mhz downloadable electric service meters. FYI

That's wonderful! I wish all these unregulated freqs were a little better regulated...

[aleehatami]

You can probably do this with Homeseer 2.0 with the speaker application if you had more than one computer in the house.

[jjsmd]

What exactly is the speaker application in HS2?

I have been holding off converting to HS2 because I have a lot of plugins that are not yet supported. I have just skimmed the messages about HS2 and I am not sure about the speaker application. Are you implying that I can have speaker apps on different computers and have HS2 have them speak with a command over a network?

If that is the case it would probably solve my whole house announcement problem.

Joe

[aleehatami]

yes that is what HS 2.0 speaker app does. You run homeseer on one server and you can just install the speaker app on other computers and they will all connect to the home seer server. Then you can setup a script to send voice commands to all other computers that have speakerapp installed.

It is a little buggy right now but since I am new to home automation anyway I am starting with it. If you have alot of plugins and scripts already I would stay away as it will probably take ALOT of tweaking to get them to work correctly.

[anogee]

Go for wires if you can. I covered my house with 8 and can hear them anywhere. I use a PA amp with 8 ohm speakers and a 70V PA transformer at each. Sound quality is very good and I use it for background music sometimes. Whatever you do, just make sure the volume is adjustabe. A speaker in a room with a floor will be much louder than in a room with carpret.

[Dirk]

Another method

One other method of whole-house audio that I use and many be of value to may of you is to use the FRS/GMRS (Family Radio Service / General Mobile Radio Service) radios and set the one near the HS machine speaker and set it to use VOX. You can then place the same type of radios in specific places in the home and they double as a great intercom system. Most of these you will see as handheld units (which makes it even more functional because you can monitor the house while gardening, or sitting on the patio with a cold one etc.) but you can obtain 'desktop' type units off eBay and other electronic retailers for $22 to $40 depending on features. Most of the desktop units also have a battery backup system so if your HA machine is run off a battery backup system the announcements will still be heard throughout the home as long as your battery power holds out.

Most of the units also have CTCSS (tone encoding/decoding) capability so you can set all the units to a frequency AND a private CTCSS code and you will not hear any other annoucements but those using your CTCSS. Every now and then I get a 'blurp' (technical term for spurious radio emmission) from bleedover frequencies and it triggers the CTCSS momentarily but for the most part they work very well. As an extra feature, many of these come with a setting to monitor NOAA alert tones (weather alerts) however, I have not had much luck with this as in SOME of these radios I think this feature is secondary and the listening circuit is of lower quality. But if you are close to a NOAA tranmission site, or your radio has a better NOAA weather alert - this feature could be of great value to those of you residing in areas that are hit hard by the weather.

As I said, these also double as very good intercoms. I have a professional radio in my truck and can even monitor my home as much as 2 miles away. Longer distance is possible with some higher-power, non-licensed spectrum. Of course, the longer the range, the more expensive the radio - but if your need is long-distance monitoring it can be done relatively inexpensively.

One thing worth mentioning, however, is that because the radio is set to use VOX, you will NOT want to use this type of setup if you find yourself or your children playing MP3's or there is any other type of loud background noise that will trip the VOX circuit. My HS system is in a network room in my basement, so there is never any noise. The units generally all have mic/speaker inputs, however, the way the VOX circuitry is designed, you cannot run the output of the speaker directly to the input on the units (I have tried). I am confident this can be done but I am pretty sure either an isolation circuit or other type of PTT circuit would be needed. Because my unit is in a quiet environment, I never bothered with this method - but I would be very interested in hearing if somebody gets this to work directly from the speaker out (Email me).

One more method, if you are really looking to go an inexpensive way - but have total flexibility in placement is to use an FM transmitter. You can find these in a myriad of combinations, however the ones I recommend for HA use are the ones that are powered directly from 110 VAC and the newer types (search eBay) that are powered directly from the USB port on the computer. In this scenario you can use standard, cheap, FM radios and tune them to the frequency of the transmitter (PLL or DIGITAL tunig radios work best because they don't drift as much as their analog, rotary-dial counterpart types do). This achieves pretty much the same results as the FRS/GMRS scenario described above but it is cheaper and only ONE WAY audio. In this scenario, the output of the computer CAN be fed directly into the transmitters input. In addition to broadcasting the HomeSeer audio announcements, it can also play any audio throughout the house. Works great for listening to MP3's and streaming audio events like newscasts/weather while you get ready for work. - (OK so I'm a geek ). The only other thing I will mention here is that all of your close neighbors MAY also be able to hear whatever you are playing - depending on the distance and the power of the transmitter. I have some (Pre FCC lockdown days) higher-power units and can travel several blocks! My newest and smallest digital-tuning transmitter can easily transmit throughout my entire home from my theatre room in the basement and cost about $25.

I hope this was enlightening for those of you who need whole-house audio and who want to do it on the cheap, yet flexible. The new HomeSeer Application is fantastic for those of us with computers in every room and if you want to monitor your home from the office or while in a hotel room. For those who may only need it in strategic places - these scenarios work very well.

Happy Automating!

-Dirk
Full Spectrum Technologies
(autom8 "AT" fullspectrumtech.net)

[aleehatami]

Yea... what he said

[jjsmd]

As far as the speaker app is concerned, in one of the the messages from Rich, I believe he mentioned that the speaker app is available in the "professional" version of HS2.

What is the "professional version"?

Joe

[bdickhaus]

The Pro version is the version that will run on their appliance and will only be available to professional installers.

However the speaker app is available in the regular version of HS2. The only feature that will be in the Pro version is the ability to know from which instance of the speaker app a voice recognition phrase is received. But in the regular version all instances of the speaker app can speak using TTS (SAPI5), play wav files and do voice recognition.

In fact, to get any sound out of HS2 or do VR, you must run at least one instance of the speaker app, either locally or remotely.

Bill