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**petez69** · April 15, 2006, 03:33 AM

Hi Andrew

Well I'd like to welcome you to the forum. I am very much a newbie, 9 months into automation and I feel like I'm still on the starting blocks. Being in the US, your going to have lots of options for connectivity and hence I cant comment on most of them ie: Z-Wave, insteon etc.

As far as Automation goes, there are a few must have plugins however I'm sure many have different opinions. Stuff like Doomotion that manages lights, occupancy, dusk/dawn is great. The ACRF plugin to manage the W800 receiver is excellent as it supports up to 8 receivers allowing great RF coverage over your property. Couple that with some keyfobs and palmpads, you'll have LOTS of fun. My kids each have heir own and I made sure, they cant turn on each others bedroom light :-)

I always thought the HAWKEYE units were toys, being battery operated however these units are just a must have. On E-Bay, you can pick them up direct cheap and thanks to reasonable shipping rates, I've got 15 of them scattered around the house, both inside and out.

Main Lobby is the ants pants when it comes to a GUI interface. Couple that with a touch panel and the WAF will remain high ! We've got a ML screen in the kitchen and soon to have another one upstairs at the top of the stairs.

If your conscious about security, consider integrating something like an ELK into the system. You can almost completely drive the panel from HS/Main Lobby which means you dont need to stick keypads around the house. HS can drive the relays on the ELK panel and the inputs are mapped into DOOmotion which is a bonus.

I have not implemented house audio as its not cheap in Australia. I have through put a few speakers around the house with a 10W amp on it and Kate tells us whats going on. I can really recommend the Text to Speech voice pack, its great.

I've got a BETA plugin from PAK that drives little 24 bit ethernet i/o boards that are around the house. These are fantastic, allows a unified cabling system ie: ethernet, has inbuilt port scanners so you dont need to poll the units for status change and outputs are toggled instantaneously. I've found if I was on a pure X10 sollution, the WAF would crash as things take too long to turn on. I've put a box in the ceiling and wired back each light to a contactor.... its FAST and reliable and cheap

As far as scripting goes, I'm only new and cant offer advice however there is HUGE amounts of support on the boards.

Also, the SMS plugin works great, you ALWAYS know whats going on.

I may not have answered your questions however one thing I have learnt, dont rush in and make it all mainstream.. things will go wrong and can seriously KILL the WAF... test, test, run it for a few weeks in the garage/study and then introduce things when u feel its stable enough....

Enjoy..Pete

**sonypoolplr** · April 15, 2006, 07:02 AM

Like Pete said, Welcome to the board. When I started out I wasn't that good at scripting, and while I am getting better, I can't touch what others are doing. But with Homeseer sometimes you will will be able to acomplish what you need without a script. But if you come to need a script for something there are a lot of good examples that are in the Homeseer/script directory when you download the program. Also, this board has a great bunch of people that are always there to help with a question.

I would second the Doomotion and the ACRF plugin, as I have had good results with both.

Even though I haven't seen much talk about it lately, I would think if you are going to go with zwave I would get the serial interface instead of the usb. I have the usb and I have sometimes where I get errors, but not as much with HS 2.1 as with previous builds.

I use Mainlobby and I think it is nice for the touchscreens. I would recommend it if you don't want to create your own html pages. There is also a touchpad interface for Homeseer that some people are using and they seem to like it as well.

Hope some of this helps.

**Rupp** · April 15, 2006, 10:25 AM

Andrew,
In addition to what others are saying, we are here to help with any questions you may have in your HA journey.

**HulkvsAndre** · April 17, 2006, 02:51 PM

Congratulations on your decision. I am quickly coming up on 1 year of home automation. It's an ever-evolving project. I will say that it is definitely a life changer and that I would never return to the the "old" ways.

**dantelope** · April 17, 2006, 05:21 PM

Welcome to the club, Andrew. When you get to the audio portion of your design, let me know if you have any questions. I've been working on a VR/intercom/monitor system involving the AP800 in some shape or form for a year or so now and have just gotten to the implementation phase.

You'll also find many people willing to help you with scripting/programming here, myself included.

Modern languages are no different than the "C" you're used to. The syntax changes, but the concepts pretty much stay the same. HA lends itself fairly well to procedural programming, so you don't really need to worry about the object-oriented stuff.

Dan

**Jim'll** · April 17, 2006, 05:40 PM

Welcome.

I have been using HS for a couple of years and I still don't know how to do scripts.
Basically I have not needed to I have a large setup and have found that you can do most of what you want using the events basically you can say if this happens do this, i.e. turn on a light or appliance speech etc.
And on the few occasions that I have needed a script then the people on here are sooo helpful as you can see :-)

Mainlobby is amazing I am not good at designing things and I am not arty but I have easily put together a bunch of screens that look great and professional.

**Tom Kern** · April 17, 2006, 08:04 PM

Welcome Andrew.

I believe the best way to learn scripting is to take existing scripts and read through them, then make a small modification to better suit your needs. If you have programmed in the past it should be even easier to understand.

**ArbWare** · April 18, 2006, 05:30 AM

Thank you all for the words of encouragement...

As i said at first... one of the main reasons i picked H.S. is because of the help and knowledge made available through you-all in these boards.

I've started to buy stuff !

A friend at work (just by me talking about what i want to do has gotten him interested in it as well

! ) and I went in together and found 17 Fujitsu 3400's with base and all accessories for $150/per ... so i'll have 7 of these to use as control pads around the house... If it's overkill... i can find someone that wants them at my cost... but it seemed a good deal.

I've got a couple of hawkeyes coming...

I've aquired a PIII 500 mhz machine to be my initial H.S. machine... (enough horsepower?)

I think i'll start with light control for Basement lights... (kids and Me <SHEEPISH grin>forget to turn off the basement lights after getting soda's out of the fridge down there....

)

Also going to start pulling speakere wires for Master B.R. and Kitchen... for the start of Whole house audio... (I am soooo lucky to have a split level house ... with attic access over Every room except the "den"... and there is a crawl space below that

)

I'll probably download/purchase the main H.S. program either this weekend or next...

I'll be posting all sorts of questions... so my appologies in advance ... i'll try to use the search... but i'm sure i'll miss some and ask questions that are common knowledge to everyone else...

I am EXCITED

... i haven't had this much fun in AGES ! ... and i'm just in the planning stage.

Thanks again for the feedback and most importantly ... being here as a resource

Andrew.

**Rupp** · April 18, 2006, 11:46 AM

Originally posted by ArbWare

I've aquired a PIII 500 mhz machine to be my initial H.S. machine... (enough horsepower?)

Andrew.

This will be on the fringe for running HS 2.1 especially if your planning on using Text To Speech and VR. Also load it with as much RAM as you can. The .net runtimes like RAM.

**ArbWare** · April 22, 2006, 02:58 PM

Originally posted by Rupp

This will be on the fringe for running HS 2.1 especially if your planning on using Text To Speech and VR. Also load it with as much RAM as you can. The .net runtimes like RAM.

I just received the machine..

It's actualy a Compaq PIII 1GHZ with 256 mb ram and 20 gb hard drive.
2 serial ports
2 usb ports
On Board vid/sound

Will this be good for a bit? I can probalby take the ram up to 512 with some cheap memory.

Thanks for the heads up..

Andrew

**Rupp** · April 22, 2006, 03:29 PM

Originally posted by ArbWare

I just received the machine..

It's actualy a Compaq PIII 1GHZ with 256 mb ram and 20 gb hard drive.
2 serial ports
2 usb ports
On Board vid/sound

Will this be good for a bit? I can probalby take the ram up to 512 with some cheap memory.

Thanks for the heads up..

Andrew

That's much better and yes 512MB is a minimum for running .net applications and 768 or 1 gig will be just right.

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