Need some help

[MikeWis]

Ok.. i am long time HomeSeer user. I was using Homeseer before it was called Homeseer so its been a long time. I monitor this board on and off but generally don't have a lot of time to spend. My Full time job is IT manager and I have been given the task to provide a two class rooms with high tech and easy to use for teachers to utilize. So my skills from Home Automation tells me I should be able to do this low cost and provide an easy to use to interface.

My goals are as follows:

7 or 10 inch touch screen for controlling the following:

Control lighting in classroom
There will be a Short Throw Interactive Projector
I want to be able to switch in a Computer, Document Camera and Blue Ray Player
I want to control the Audio from the touch panel

Most hi-tech classrooms have Creston Panels and video switchers and scalers but they are very expensive and you need to have a dealer install them. You have to go to a dealer to get the equipment and you need to have that dealer program them for you. You cannot just buy the software and do it yourself.

We have very limited budget to do this but I think with HS Automation and what it can do I can do this but unsure what components I could interface and what Homeseer solution I could use.


Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks
Mike

[chewie]

What about just using a couple of the tabletop touchscreens and building a panel for each classroom?

For lighting in the classroom a lot of it depends on how much lighting and such you are talking about. If this is a small area with just a couple of overhead light switches and the room are next to each other you could use Z-wave switches.

For the rest you are going to be kind of cobbling together a bunch of different systems in order to do this on the cheap, most business systems utilize hard wired solutions for all those things, but you could look at the Zantech IR distribution systems for getting the IR signal to everything, one of the IR blasters and then use HS to learn the IR codes and perform the switching with events. The issue is that if anything gets missed then you have to re trigger the events and hope that things are not simple toggles. Ir gets annoying.

My 2 cents.

[Guest]

I'm sure there will be better options, but to me this sounds like a simple project using USB-UIRT to blast IR commands to a MonoPrice or similar purchased video input switch with iR control, and an audio switch the same way. Then you could create simple events in HS that are triggered via HSTouch to emit the iR as required and switch inputs in the classroom. Lighting control is obviously a simple thing to integrate and maybe even include a webcam view for their fish tank or something clever ;-)