Managing large homes

• Your electric bill is 30% higher this month.  Is something wrong?
• All of your bulbs are suddenly burning out much quicker. Why?
• Two guests in a row have complained that the guest bedroom is cold.
• The pool is taking longer to warm up than you remember.
• It's spring - what needs to be done to get the pool house ready.
• It's going to be 95 degrees out for 3 days straight - what was that special thing you needed to do 3 years ago?

I have a simple premise.  Without logs of both system performance and maintenance activities, it's very hard for owners to make sense of what is actually going on in a large home. And forget about tracking what happened - it's too hard.

The solution - a flight recorder for your home...operating quietly in the background keeping track of things so you don't have too.  



Google/Crestron - a perfect match

Everyone and their brother and sister seems to be trying to capture the hearts and minds of the power companies to manage in-home electrical usage.  Do the power companies have either?

One - Take a Crestron Prodigy System with a wireless thermostat. Any Crestron control system can be used - what's interesting about this one is you can put it in for a lot less than any climate logging system I know about.

 +   

Two - Ambleside's Sensor Logging service moves data from Crestron to Google.  We can move lots of interesting information - temperature + humidity, power usage, exercise machine usage with heart rate-anything really.  In this case we're recording the temperature of our office.

 [I used to have some live data but the hits just went through the roof...static data for now]

 

Network/AudioVideo convergence is not coming - it's here

3 years ago, we built a very advanced high-definition distributed video system.  There were quite a few sources - about 30 overall - distributed to 12 different rooms.  Across the entire video distribution system there were apx. 15 devices with network connections - the crestron controllers, Tivo's, Kaleidescape media server, AppleTV and a few others.

We're now in the middle of a new system, fewer sources - only 12, fewer rooms - just 10 - but the network address count is is over 70. That's just the video distribution system. Our overall network address count will be 200+.  Every single box seems to have a network connection - the video reciever (Crestron Digital Media Fiber Optic boxes), the TV's, the audio processors, every single source....even the RF reciever for the remote controls have IP addresses (right now, it seems as if the gym headphones will in fact be without TCPIP connectivity.)  Meanwhile, this house has 1/5th the wire we had in the 1st example house...and managed switches cost 1/10th per port what they did 36 months ago...

Now if I could only get all this stuff to not generate so much heat........

Ambleside's Integrated Network Platform

Ambleside has been working with Cisco for a while.  I first started working with Cisco routers as part of the T3 NSFNET deployment in 1991.  Since then they have been a strong partner through much of my work.

For several years we have been deploying robust infrastructure to home networks - much more so than our competition. As far as I know, we are the only advanced AV firm in the area who is Cisco Certified with Cisco Certified engineers on staff.  

Like many of our product lines, Cisco has an extremely broad range of products and a committment to long-term support and life-cycle engineering.  While low-end networking products can be treated as disposable, the configuration work on top of them is anything but disposable.  It used to be that configurable, manageable products were only the domain of the very top-end. Now, Cisco has brought a great deal of their key product capabilities to the small-business product line.  

Ambleside has preconfigured it's networks for remote access + monitoring, quality of service for various network devices - almost every device deployed today talks on the network and our framework provides a standard way to deploy audio + video streaming, system monitoring, control communication and many other services.

Getting ready for NetFlix on iPhones

Last tuesday, 9/29, Warner Brothers released a restored version of Wizard of Oz in Blu-ray.  It's currently the #2 selling title on Amazon.

They released to the rental market on the same day - it's on Vudu, Amazon VOD and iTunes.  Thats nice but not out of the ordinary.

What's interesting is that NetFlix is hosting free access to any and all viewers on October 3.  If you don't have a netflix account, you can view on your PC, if you do have a netflix account and a netflix enabled device, you can view in HD.  This is quite a stress test....Are they proving they are a viable channel to Cable?  Trying to validate their network to prepare for iPhone? Or settling a bet with a warner exec?  Who knows....