I decided to experiment a little. First I hooked up a simple stereo amplifier in the basement and connected it to the 8-ohm speaker pair. Then I hooked up to the LAN a low-cost HP Netbook that I had recently received as a gift. I configured the Netbook to run iTunes (and not much else). With the speaker output plugged into the amplifier I could now play any sound off the Netbook through the living room speakers. But how to handle the remote control?

To the rescue came Apple’s great Remote app which I downloaded for free on their Appstore. As I have mentioned in a previous post, we have a couple of iPod Touch units which I want to use as remote controls for The Asia House’s systems. This was a perfect opportunity.

First I had to download (for $4.95 on the Appstore) an upgrade to the iPod Touch operating system. After that the Remote app easily synchronized with the copy of iTunes running on the Netbook in the basement using a secure pairing function. It took a little more work to add the links to over 2,500 internet radio stations that came with iTunes, but by adding one playlist for each genre and dragging-and-dropping the radio station titles into the appropriate playlists, I am now able to also select radio stations to play in the living room.

The next thing, of course, is to figure out how to connect the other speakers in the house in a similar fashion, without having to add too many PC’s. I have a couple of ideas on how to do that; now if I could only find enough time to do it in…

The iPod Touch is perfect for this. The user interface is great and it looks good. Here I’m showing one of the control pages for the Linksys wireless access point. My iPod Touch is encased in a plastic case for protection, and it also has a stand in the rear. Of course, I have not yet implemented any interesting control software on the house server, but they’re coming!

Now our house is watched day and night, and all outdoor activities are recorded, time-stamped and digitally stored on hard-disk. There is also an alarm that goes off if any of the cameras are tampered with, or if there is any movement when and where there isn’t supposed to be. But more on the security system in a future post…

Don’t worry if you can’t see it – it’s above the barely visible manhole that’s recessed in the awning above the outdoor deck. You might have seen a picture of this location elsewhere in this blog. The location was planned during the design phase of the house, and the wiring was put in early on. The location that I had originally planned was actually on a small shelf under the ceiling in the dining room, but John (our architect) refused to have it visible, arguing that it contrasted with the modern Asian style of the house.

I know what you’re really thinking now: “how could they have lived in The Asia House for a year before they installed WiFi?”  Well, what can I say; we didn’t really need it. We seldom have guests that feel the need to whip out their laptops, and we have a LAN jack in every room. But last week I got an SMS message from my sister Mia, who lives in London. She was leaving in 10min but wanted to have a quick Skype call first, to greet me on my birthday. We were having dinner at the time, and she said “why don’t you just open the laptop at the dinner table, and I can talk to all of you?”. Well, now she can…

I found an old Linksys WRT54G wireless router lying around. Unfortunately I had hacked the firmware of the WRT54G a few years ago, and replaced it with third-party open source firmware in order to extend its functionality. I used an old Sveasoft binary, but if I were to do it again I’d probably use something from DD-WRT. Anyway, I wanted the router restored to its original factory configuration so I first downloaded the binary for the original firmware from the Linksys website and flashed it using the router’s web-based interface. Then I configured the router and tested it before installing it at the deck.

Since the wiring was already in place, all I had to do was crimp an RJ45 connector onto the LAN cable and also tie the power supply in place so it wouldn’t fall out. Finally, I bent the router antennas a bit in order to get a stronger signal in the basement. I’ll observe the network conditions for a week or two, and if it’s not good enough then I might replace this old Linksys router with a much better one from Belkin that I know I’ve got lying around here somewhere…

You can also clearly see the distortion of the wide angle lens, which I don’t mind since it also allows the camera a very wide field of view. A couple of hours later the weather got worse. It was pouring rain and very windy. Especially at our location on a hilltop, The Asia House is quite exposed to the elements. This is what the user interface to the Rover DVR looked like in a remote browser window when viewing the Camera 1 output:

The picture quality is awful. I’m not sure what those white streaks are – I think they’re spider web, but I’ll have to check it out and fix it in the morning. In fact, anything immediately in front of the camera housing throws a lot of infrared light right back into the camera. Each CCTV camera is equipped with dozens of infrared LED’s, enabling them to “see” in the dark. Here’s an interesting pair of photos of the first CCTV camera up on its post at the corner of The Asia House’s perimeter fence:

Both photos are taken with a Sony HDR-SR5 Handycam, but in the right photo I switched the Handycam to Night mode, which disables its built-in infrared filter. You can clearly see the infrared light emitted by the CCTV camera, which is otherwise invisible to the human eye.

Hopefully I’ll be able to cable them up and test them next weekend. Another thing that happened the other week was that PC Express finally called and said that my replacement network switch was ready for pickup. You may recall that my previous switch was busted; the manufacturer just confirmed that I received a lemon and sent me a new one. Here’s what it looks like with the DSL modem plugged into my broadband router, and the router plugged into the new 16-port switch:

Finally we have broadband Internet available in the whole house. On the right-hand side is the new Digital Video Recorder, which I’m quite excited to get hooked up to the cameras.

I spent some time looking around at what was available on the market, from multi-channel frame grabber boards to off-the-shelf DVR boxes. I had quite a bit of trouble determining an appropriate hardware configuration, ensuring that the right Linux device drivers were available, etc. The more time I spent on deciding which hardware to buy, the more I realized that assembling and maintaining a good, reliable DVR system would take a bit longer time than I had expected. In addition, I decided that since this is a surveillance system, it has to stay up no matter what. It needed to be rugged, reliable and low power (so it could run off a car battery for a significant length of time). It also had to have programmable digital outputs so I could connect it to another alarm system, and it had to have a good Ethernet interface so I could program and access it remotely.

In the end, I decided to buy an off-the-shelf DVR box. The low cost and good functionality of something like the Rover Systems 4-channel DVR was just too good to pass up. The Rover box had all of the functionality I needed, plus it cost less than $200 and drew less than 40W. It was a plug-and-play solution so I could move on and spend more time with the rest of the house systems. The user interface was great – I could program motion sense areas with a mouse, and I could even download video off the hard disk via the built-in web interface.

On the front there are the usual buttons to select which view you want to see on the external monitor (all 4 cameras or only 1), as well as control buttons for the DVR (record, play, search, etc). In addition, there are menu control buttons and a USB port. The rear of the box has 4 BNC camera inputs, as well as a BNC monitor output, audio in/out, an Ethernet port and a screw terminal for RS-485, alarm in and relay output. There is also a USB port for a mouse, for use when programming the DVR locally.

In addition to the DVR, I also got myself 4 nice little CCTV cameras. I got them inexpensively at Hua Qiang Bei in Shenzhen, my favorite place in the world to buy DIY electronics, where I paid less than 1/3 of what they cost in the Philippines. I got the shopkeeper to swap out the standard lenses for 6.5mm wide-angle lenses, and the cameras are also equipped with IR LED’s for true night-vision.

The cameras came with mounting brackets, but I also got a local machine shop to make for me custom steel poles so that I could raise 3 of the cameras up off the perimeter walls. The red color of the rust-proofing doesn’t look too presentable though, so I’ll need to paint them white before installing them. More on this next time!

The Harmony remote is great! It took me a while to figure out how to get the sequences just right, but once I did it was such a relief to put away the remotes and keep just one sleek-looking device on the armrest:

Mind you, to tell the truth I cheated a little: I never use the remote for the subwoofer, since it just sits quietly in a corner and does its thing, so I didn’t bother programming it in. As for the remote for the Sony PS3, since it needs a special accessory to deal with the RF link I haven’t added that one in yet either. But since we mainly watch movies using the HD-based media player, not being able to use the PS3 won’t bother me for a while. At least the Harmony 525 replaces 3 frequently used remotes:

I didn’t like the software much; the user interface is awkward and non-standard, and there is too much jumping back and forth to figure out how to do things. It also requires that you remain connected to the Internet at all times. On the good side, it connects to a very impressive database over at Logitech with data on the operations of over 225,000 devices. It also allows you to train new remote control commands, which came in real handy when I had to add two commands for Page Up and Page Down, which were missing from the database for the eGreat EG-M31B.

I think the warm blue light from the backlit display of the Harmony 525 will be a source of great comfort from now on…  It even has a Help button and a built-in assistant.

We got an Egreat EG-M31B from eHome. It’s not the best one out there, but new ones come up so fast that as long as it does what I want it to do, I’m happy. I can always get a new one next Christmas.

This box happily streams full HD movies with 5.1 surround sound via HDMI to my Denon AVR-1908 receiver all day. I’ve also heard good things about media players from Popcornhour and Western Digital.

I’ve never had any problems with this player, and as long as you have good media files it’ll play them flawlessly. The support from eHome has also been great, and they’re one of my favorite stores in Manila.

For those of you who have seen my home theater, you know that I have a Sony PS3 which I use to play DVD’s and Blu-ray discs. It works, and is probably still the lowest-cost Blu-ray player on the market, but I get a little tired of waiting for it to boot and to start playing a disc. Unfortunately, the EG-M31B also takes its sweet time to power up. I’ll be looking for something faster on my next upgrade.

Or maybe it just takes a while to start up because I have 3TB (yes, three terrabytes) of hard disk connected to it, and it needs some time to catalog the content before it displays a menu. The EG-M31B has a 1TB drive internally, and I have an external 1TB My Book Essential Edition from WD connected via USB 2.0. Then I needed somewhere to store all the pictures and video from our family vacations, so I added a 1TB My Book Studio Edition, also from WD. I connect this drive to the EG-M31B via eSATA, but more importantly it also has a Firewire 400/800 interface which allows us to transfer video to and from our iMac at a decent speed.

The main problem with the setup is that movie watching has become so addictive… You come home from a long day at work and it is so tempting to sit yourself down in the home theater, select from hundreds of HD movies with a few presses on the remote control, and then just sit back, and mindlessly fry your brain.

As for news, The Asia House is finally connected. It took months before we got an intermittent phone connection, and well into May before we got a so-so Internet connection. The reliability is still not what it should be, but at least now it is on more than it is off.

The technician from Globe Telecom was scratching his head when he arrived at the house to install the phone and the ADSL line: “You want to install what, where?”  I don’t think he was used to having the ADSL modem installed so far from the phone. In The Asia House, the phone goes in the kitchen and the ADSL modem goes in my office in the basement. Usually they’re side-by-side. Anyway, I had him install his thing in the kitchen first, then after he left I ripped it up and did it again.

I took the ADSL modem down into the basement and spliced the “Phone” output of the line splitter to the in-house phone line that goes up to the kitchen. The “Modem” output goes to the ADSL modem, and the “Line” input was spliced to the incoming phone line. So far, so good. In the near future, by the way, the phone in the kitchen will only be an extension connected to a PABX I’m installing in the basement, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

Once the modem was connected, my problems started. The Asia House has 15 LAN connections scattered throughout the house (don’t ask). So I connected the Siemens SE260 ADSL2 Ethernet Modem, which was delivered by Globe, to a D-Link Ethernet Broadband Router, and from the router to a 16-port D-link switch. Sounds straight forward, right?  The router provides a firewall, network address translation, DHCP server, etc, while the switch routes traffic throughout the house.

Two weeks of on-and-off experimenting later I still had not been able to configure things properly. So I gave up and called in a real geek. His alias is “Xenix” and he works at a local Internet cafe. Interesting individual. Anyway, to cut a long story short, he cloned the MAC address of the ADSL modem onto the router, configured the router’s IP address generation range properly, and figured out that my 16-port switch was busted. Alright; we were in business. At least, I will be as soon as I get my 16-port switch back from the shop.