Black Sharpies!

You know you're a CI when...


...you find black Sharpies all over the house.  I promise you, this is not an exaggeration, and I haven't even gone digging around to find more yet.  This is just what I saw when getting ready for work this morning.

Right now there are black Sharpies:

• (1) under bathroom sink
• (1) on wife's nightstand
• (2) on my nightstand
• (4) in cup on dresser in bedroom
• (3) in cup on computer desk
• (4) on dresser next to computer desk

...and I probably have NONE in my van since I carry them all inside when I get home.  Time to go buy more!

Firmware that breaks stuff? Sweet! Where do I sign up?

Ohh RTI...  QC problems?  Ehh, OK.  I can deal with that.  Chalk it up to a new manufacturing process, or new plant, or RoHS lead-free solder; whatever.  Products that take longer to come to market than planned?  Yeah, again, whatever.  Vaporware is fine by me.  I'm not even going to tell a customer about something that isn't at least in stock at my local disty.  Firmware updates that break things?  That ain't cool.  (Is this a foreshadowing of C4 in my future?? :)  )



Recently RTI released version 2.1 firmware for all two-way enabled devices.  Cool!  Through the power of the interwebs, I already knew that the 2.1 XP-8 firmware makes the power sense ports not respond to anything.  Luckily.  Also, in preparing for our Open House I was trying to get an MX-980 to issue Litetouch RS232 commands by sending IR triggers to the XP-8 to execute macros.  I'm not too well versed in URC, but I have used the IR macro triggers to do some funky things before and they always worked perfectly.  Couldn't get them to work at all.  Is this another thing that 2.1 breaks?  Who knows!  Had RTI come out and at least told us that these things were bugs in the 2.1 firmware then I wouldn't have wasted 2 hours trying to get it to work.


Here was my problem.  I have a house with three Zigbee T2-C's and an XP-8.  It was my first job with multiple Zigbee remotes and multiple ZM24 antennas.  Had a TON of problems getting it set up; apparently us RTI dealers are unwitting beta testers.  I'm cool with beta testing as long as I know that's what I'm doing.  I went back out to this house and while I was there I figured I would update the remotes to 2.1 since they supposedly cleared up some Zigbee wake-up issues.  I knew I couldn't update the XP-8 because I'm using a power sense event to trigger whole house audio to come on.  Had I not known this (thanks to Remote Central) I would've loaded 2.1 into the XP-8 and probably wouldn't have tested that power sense event.  Why would I?


So I load 2.1 into the three remotes.  Goes fine.  I made a few minor changes to the programming, so I had to update the XP-8.  No go.  I get an error that the Weather driver is an old version and the XP-8 can't be updated.  Huh?  OK, well maybe I can just update the Weather driver to 1.1.  No go.  It already shows 1.1.  OK, well I can't update to 2.1... so what do I do?  I call RTI.  I had read that they had an unreleased 2.2 firmware for the XP-8.  I call and beg for it.  He tells me that yes they have one, but he's not sure he can give it to me.  He confirms that it fixes the power sense issue and mentions something about system macros, but I didn't quite catch it.  I'm assuming it's the IR macro triggers I couldn't get to work at the shop.  Well he agrees to send it to me.  Cool.  After a few hours of going back and forth with misspelled email addresses and messages stuck in spam limbo, I finally get it.  Upload it and all is well.


Or is it?  My Home Page with weather info at the bottom now has no image and the text all reads %SYS%% and a bunch of other garbled stuff.  Great.  Check the programming and now all my existing weather page variables are linked to long garbled strings of characters instead of what they are supposed to be (like Forecast 1 - Day).  No way I'm rebuilding all those pages, so I open up a version of the system file from before I got to the house that day.  Check the weather variables and they all have the same garbled info.  So I add a couple new weather pages from the page wizard... and they all have the garbled variables, too!  How in the world is that possible?  I just did a T3-V and T4 at the shop with the page wizard's weather pages and they all worked fine right out of the "box", just like they should.


I go back to my current system file and have to remove every single weather variable and re-add it.  What a pain in the a$$.  Update the remotes and they work fine.  WTF?


Obviously RTI knew about the problems because they already had a 2.2 firmware completed.  Why couldn't they at LEAST post a note on the dealer side of their web site telling us that the firmware caused a couple problems, tell us what those problems are, and tell us they're working on it and will have a fix out ASAP??  I understand not having 2.2 available on their website yet as they were probably still testing it, but why leave us in the dark like that?


On top of this crap, I was adding two IR sensors, an IR hub, and one emitter to this system.  I should have been out of this house in 90 minutes.  I had already gone over all the customer's questions, made the programming updates, and at 90 minutes in I was finished hooking up the IR sensors.  Well, after a bad IR hub and these firmware problems, I was there for over 5 hours.  My whole day was shot.  


Fun times. 

Grand Opening

Phew...  After weeks of scrambling preparations, our Grand Opening was last night.  Other than the weather SUCKING and traffic being really bad for no reason (one person who usually has a 20 minute ride took an hour and 45 minutes) it turned out great!  We had about 75 people show up, did guided tours of each room, had great food and drinks, door prizes, a cartoonist doing caricatures (on a paper with our logo and information at the bottom... sneaky...) and just a good time for all.  Now our 'builders' can see the custom stuff they never knew we did and the 'custom builders' got to see the sheer volume of work we can handle.  Nice.

So why was it stressful getting set up for this?  Here's why... I had about 2 weeks to revamp what all the equipment in each room could do.  Didn't have to hang TVs or install speakers or anything like that, but I redid the entire control system and made every source, including 3 cameras, available everywhere.  To summarize, here is what was installed when I started here back in Feb.  This was simply a design that wasn't planned out in a single vision; it was let's add this here, let's add that there, etc.  No one was in a position to step back and see what could be done.  It's not that there wasn't anyone who could pull it off, there was just no time to do it and I just don't think anyone saw how close they were to the potential that was there.


It was:
Room A
You could view one DirecTV receiver or Escient Fireball via composite video

Room B
You could view one DirecTV receiver, Bose Lifestyle, Blu-Ray, (all component video, thank god) and do some good/better/best speaker demos.  MX-980 for control.

Room C
Four-screen video wall; only displayed one DirecTV receiver full screen and played audio through 1 pair of ceiling speakers

Room D (theater)
You could view Blu-Ray, PS3, Wii, and one DirecTV receiver.  MX-810 for control.

Main racks - MRF-350 tied to everything.  MSC-400 installed in a nice RSH shelf, but wasn't hooked to anything LOL!  :)

Here's what I changed.  I have to give most of the credit to the bosses who OK'ed spending the money on the stuff I suggested.

Main Racks
Left MRF-350, pulled MSC-400 out.
Added RTI XP-8 and Zektor Clarity Elite 8x8 component video and audio matrix.  If you haven't heard of them, I HIGHLY suggest checking them out.  This piece of gear is unbelievable for what it is.  The control is incredible, performance is transparent and fast, and it does things you wouldn't even think of.  (analog/digital and digital/analog conversion, three composite/s-video to component transcoded inputs in addition to the 8 component inputs, input gain control, audio delay control, timed volume fade commands, follow-me zone control [pay attention - this one sounds confusing...  you're playing a source in one room and are about to go into the next room but want to shut the first room down.  One command fades the volume out in room 1, puts that source into room 2 and fades the volume up to the exact level where you had it.  That is ONE COMMAND.... INSIDE THE MATRIX, not in the control system!  One serial string!]) 
Much thanks to Jeff Haynes from Zektor for getting us this unit in perfect time to get it installed for our show!
http://www.zektor.com

Room A
View 4 DirecTV receivers and Escient Fireball.  Control from MX-810 (the one that used to be in the theater)

Room B
View one DirecTV receiver, Blu-Ray, and Bose Lifestyle.  Didn't change much in here since there was already so much to do with the speaker demos and all... Control still from MX-980.  Adding sources is just a programming change away...

Room C
View 4 DirecTV receivers, Blu-Ray, Escient Fireball, and 3 security cameras on any or all screens of the video wall, all independent of each other.  Ceiling speakers and new wireless headphones (two different audio zones) can play audio from any screen or video wall.  Plus that audio zone will follow if you change sources.  So the ceiling speakers aren't just playing DirecTV 3, they're playing DirecTV 3 but a tracking the Bottom Left screen.  Change the source on the Bottom Left screen and they follow suit.  Same goes for wireless headphones.  Doesn't sound like much but it took some thinking to figure out how to do it with only set flag/clear flag/test flag commands available to me.  Control is now via T4 (with 2-way feedback through Wi-Fi).  T4 is also programmed to control the theater.

Room D (theater)
In addition to the PS3 and Wii, you can now view all 4 DirecTV receivers, 3 security cameras, and control the Litetouch system in that room.  Control is now a T3-V.


All in all a fun night. Only 2 or 3 minor technical glitches and everyone seemed to walk away impressed.  That's all you can ask for, right?  Oh, and my friend won a $25 Outback giftcard as a door prize.  :)

Genuine fungus, now only $2.29!

Love it.  Korean markets are MUCH more interesting than the local Giant.

I love the DACs in my Blu-Ray player

I tell you what.  I've got an older Harman/Kardon AVR which I always thought had a nice sounding amplifier section.  I knew it wasn't top of the line, but I would call it above average.  I got a Pioneer Blu-Ray (the highest non-Elite model).  In reading the specs, they seemed to be touting how great the Wolfson DACs were.  Well, my H/K doesn't have HDMI inputs anyway, so I decided to connect it all analog to the 8 Channel input.

At first I didn't know if it was the high-res audio formats on Blu-Ray discs that was making the difference, but my little* BIC Venturi front speakers sounded bigger and put out a much more wide-open sound than I had ever heard out of them.  It was the type of difference that I only thought an amplifier upgrade would provide.  Unreal. After watching a few standard DVDs, I realized it was the player itself creating this great audio.

I can't imagine that the H/K's DACs are "bad," but it opened my eyes to how much of a difference the processing makes. 

* by "little," I'm talking about price.  I've got 2 big ol' 6.5" bookshelves that get down to about 50 Hz and a center with dual 6.5"s that supposedly gets down to 38 Hz. 

Google is your..... friend?

A post at Lifehacker got me thinking. What would people see if they searched my screen name on Google?

Well I did it, and since I use the same screen name on every forum, you can see EVERYTHING I've ever posted. Not that it's rocket science, but this never occurred to me. So if a customer knows who I am on RC, they can also see anything I've put on Livestrong, Intuit, DirecTV, AVS, Personal Finance Forums, etc.

I don't post anything I wouldn't want anyone to see, but it kinda creeps me out that a customer could, without me knowing, see not only what I may have done that day, but also personal financial stuff I may have asked for advice about, whether I posted about a workout I may have skipped, or if I'm having trouble with my Quicken software. Nothing I wouldn't talk about in a general conversation, but to have someone able to see it without asking... I don't like it...

May be time for a screen name change at RC...

Thoughts?

C4... it's da bomb...

So I just did the required prerequisite online classes for Control4. They require that you go through them (about 3 hours!) before you can do their in-person 3 day training which is required to become a dealer. There was a thread on IP asking "who else thinks Control4 has it figured out?" Well, add me to that list. Not only can you do things that I've never been able to offer anyone with equipment from URC, RTI, Harmony (ewww...), Elan, Homelogic, etc. but you can do it all at a fraction of the cost.

As I understand it, C4 is on about the third revision of [some of] their hardware. Some of the features they've included are obviously based on real world situations and installer feedback. I think that's a very good thing. Some manufacturers just don't get it.

As far as the interface goes - it is what it is. When you design a C4 system, you design a C4 system. Until a few months ago I was not a fan of the interface at all; mainly because I had too much of an ego about how good of an interface I can design for a customer. Well in all reality I'm sure I'm not as good and I think I am and it still takes me a long time to put a custom interface together. 99% of the time I'm only tweaking the interface because I want to, not because the customer needs it or even wants it. With C4 I can hand the system over, say "this is how it works...", and be done. Hell, they even have a user's manual for the entire system that lays out the basics for them. I would have to sit down and finalize a "template" interface that would work for every job before I could even begin to write my own user's manual that I could hand to every customer. C4 already has it done... why do I need to reinvent the wheel?

Let me explain my position on this. I'm not talking about being lazy. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to be doing huge, elaborate jobs and writing my own code for Crestron/AMX systems. I love a challenge and get far more satisfaction out of figuring out some weird custom problem than I do from setting up yet another home theater system. "Yeah. Wow. Surround sound. Pretty cool. Anyway, do you want me to figure out how to adjust the temperature in the theater dependant on how many people are in the room, what genre of movie you're watching, what time of day it is, if someone is cooking in the kitchen, and if it's somebody's birthday??" Yeah, I'm a total tweaker. I get sidetracked trying to figure out how to do things that don't matter in the first place. I would love to work on big commercial jobs where they have truly custom requirements.

However, I don't work in that market. My customers don't need that. They also don't need the expense that would incur. They don't need the hardware required to do that stuff. They can figure out how to use the DirecTV menu and don't ask me to "improve" that [but if they did I would suggest TiVo :) ]. If they can learn that interface, they can learn the C4 interface that is already built and documented. It costs my time, my customers' money, my company's bottom line.

We're not 100% sure if we're moving forward with becoming a dealer yet, strictly because of the minimum opening order. Either way, we'll keep doing RTI for the truly "custom" jobs. RTI has by far the best programming environment in my opinion. It's just the hardware costs that are a killer. Take a look at this hardware comparison that I just made up and hope is accurate. :)

RTI ZRP-5 (replacement for the soon to be discontinued RP-1)
MSRP $299 -- requires an antenna module, either 433 or Zigbee, at $149 MSRP
Effective MSRP $450
Features:

• Best RF in the business - stores commands on processor instead of on the handheld control
  
• 5 IR emitter ports with adjustable gain for each, non-addressable
• 1 high output IR connection (for IR connecting block)
  
• 1 Power sense input

Control4 HC-200
MSRP without handheld remote (for comparison) -- $399
Features:

• Zigbee RF server built in
• 4 IR emitter ports, 2 can be used for RS232 with $20 adapter
  
• Ethernet port for system control, internet connection, IP control of devices (which saves IR/RS232 ports)
  
• Astronomical timeclock
• Analog audio output (variable or fixed) for playback of digital, networked audio
• USB port for hard drive to store mp3s and photos
• Analog audio input to digitize external source and play through analog outs or stream through network to other controllers
• Video outputs (SD and HD) for system OSD, photos, IP cameras, etc.
• Remotely programmable through internet

Come on, is this even a fair fight? :)