Digital Playground - My Home Automation and Surveillance Setup

My Home Automation and Surveillance Setup

Written by James Conbeer
Monday, 29 January 2007
I am currently in the process of buying a small house that needs totally remodeled inside and out. Being the geek that I am, I realized that this is the perfect opportunity to install All the wires and cabling that'll be required to make a Smart home. yea sure wifi is cool and I have a few AP's but the amount of data that will be traveling over the network will be quite intense. Wifi alone is not feasible for this task. Multiple Multimedia connections (streaming video and such) over the network from MythTv DVR's and surveillance video and loads of other traffic. The backbone: I'm starting with the network layer. CAT5e all the way round 2 ports per room, (upgradeable in the future to CAT6 or fiber optics) 2x100MB switched is good for now. Not to mention the price of a Good Cisco 24 port GigaBit switch is way out of my budget right now, also upgradeable. The servers: 1. Linux: User Authentication (NIS), file sharing (Samba & NFS) these are the primary roles for this server. It has other things to do but not worth mentioning here. Nothing special for the server. AMD Athlon 64 3500 socket 939(planned upgrade dual core) 2GB ram (planned upgrade 4GB) HD capacity and config, ~1TB total spread around like this. 250GB and 320GB in a Raid0 this holds all my data. These drives are on a separate IDE raid controller. There is also a 500GB HD that has a cron with rsync of the stripe and pertinent OS files. The OS is on a separate 10GB drive.(planned upgrade to 80GB) currently OpenSuse 10.2 x_86 2. Linux: Surveillance & Automation server. Software to be listed below. Athlon XP 3000 1.5 GB ram 120GB HD for “Surveillance Events”, and a 80GB HD for the OS. suse 9.3 (OS will be upgraded/changed over to Debian) Video capture: Sabrent 4 Channel DVR PCI Security Surveillance System Video Capture Card ($54.99 from Tiger direct, comes with software for windows) the card also works with Linux, V4L. Cameras: 1. Lorex Indoor/Outdoor B&W Camera with Night Vision CMOS Lens 2. Lorex Weatherproof 1/3 CCD B/W Mini Bullet Camera 3. (More cameras Planned) X10: 1. CM11(ActiveHome serial interface) 2. CM17 (Firecracker serial interface) 3. Note, I also have a CM15A (Activehome PRO USB) that currently only works with windows. The Surveillance part: ZoneMinder is a set of applications which support capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from cameras attached to a Linux system. Its Web interface lets users view, archive, review, and delete images and movies. The image analysis system is highly configurable: users can retain specific events while eliminating false positives. Works with CCTV cams, Webcams (local & remote) IP cams. The Automation part: currently: BottleRocket with BlueLava 1. BottleRocket: BottleRocket is a command-line interface for Unix systems to use the FireCracker kit. 2. BlueLava: BlueLava is a CGI script that uses various commandline x10 utilities to control supported x10 devices. planned: (working on it) MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. The Security part: MisterHouse & Zoneminder (also supports X10) combined with other features of MisterHouse. Other Systems: Mediacenter Home Brew DVR (living room) custom built. Custom case made from a 1948 Philco Radio/78 Turntable. Dual boot Winxp MCE & Linux with MythTv. Dual tuner cards. 1. Hauppauge WinTV-GO TV Tuner 2. Airstar-HD5000AV-PCI Card Kids bedroom Linux PC with Hauppauge WinTV-GO TV Tuner. Modded Xbox running Xebian. Systems to be built: 1. Kitchen PC with counter top integrated bar code scanner. (planned) 2. Workshop PC made with spare parts (planned) 3. Office PC (or not PC) Minimac (planned) Multimedia Features: Integrated Surround sound in Living room, Entertainment room, & 2 bedrooms (Planned) Home control console 1st & 2nd floor. Light weight PC (possibly mini ITX) with web browser. (planned) Some things listed (and maybe I didn't list) that I still need to purchase: 1. 42U 19” Rack 2. 19” Rack mount Server cases 3. 19” Rack Shelves 4. 6 outlet Backups 5. Touch Screen LCD's for Home control consoles 6. 2 mini/micro ITX systems for Home control consoles 7. 2 color day-night in-outdoor color CCTV cams Links to some mentioned Programs: BottleRocket: http://www.linuxha.com/bottlerocket/ BlueLava: http://www.sgtwilko.f9.co.uk/bluelava/ Zoneminder: http://www.zoneminder.com/ Misterhouse: http://misterhouse.sourceforge.net/ MythTv: http://www.mythtv.org/ I will try to keep this article updated as I migrate the equiptment from my current living space to the new house.
Last Updated ( Monday, 29 January 2007 )