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« on: January 31, 2010, 05:14:32 am »
Hi,
Here's some observations. I'm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, so maybe I'm way off and things are way cheaper in Arizona, but:
1. You should think about exactly what you want in each room. You could blow 5 grand just on the tvs for the 5 bedrooms, kitchen, office and backyard. For a massive house like that I think a ten grand budget would be more reasonable. If you can't spend that then you need to scale back or change your expectations.
Basically, If you want home automation, you're looking at spending ~45 dollars per switch (z-wave) instead of $5 a switch(if you have multiple switches on a light you only need to replace 1 of them) so you need to count all of the stuff you want to automate and multiply it by 45 dollars. Then look at all the places you want security cameras and multiply that by whatever they cost ($100 is probably reasonable, I could be way off). Then look at all the places you want tv's and add ~350 for the frontends to run the tv's. On top of that you need a core in the basement which will probably cost approx $1000 for a decent one, and at some point as you get more media you will probably want to throw a NAS on the network as well, which adds more cost. On top of this you will probably want several orbiters (think super fancy universal remotes), which will set you back between 200-600 each, depending on what you go with as the hardware.
If you don't want any home automation and you already own all the tv's you need, then you could probably do this for 5 grand. You would spend approx 3200 on media directors for the 9 locations you mentioned, 1000 on a core and then buy a couple orbiter platforms with whatever is left.
2. I haven't heard of voice control in this product, but I don't have one set up yet (still trying to buy the house), so I could be wrong.
3. run cat6 everywhere you want a tv with linuxmce on it. You'll need it.
4. You can't centralize their consoles and use them everywhere. That's impractical for several technical reasons (how would you change games? What is the range on the wireless game controllers? You might be able to hack something together in linuxmce to pipe the video from the console to the rooms, but that still would leave you unable to change games and control the game).
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Chris
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