ControlWorks Blog

Residential Sub-System Integration Woes

Jim Felderman — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:45:00 GMT

Eventually most AV Dealers graduate from integrating not just audio and video components but other unrelated sub-systems as well. When we use the term "sub-system" around our shop we are referring to other systems that our code will touch. These can include pool controllers, lighting control systems, motorized gates, HVAC systems and security systems just to name a few.

Integration of these systems pushes most Dealers into an area of potential liability that is not applicable with audio and video. Typically this is because the AV Dealer is the Crestron Dealer and managing your own installation is a snap. Managing the details of another contractor's system is a whole different bag of bolts.

If you haven't had the pleasure of working with some of these trades allow me to let you in on a little secret. There is a high probability that you are better qualified to install the product then the contractor is! Oh sure people can jump all over me for generalizing about the industry but after doing this a few years I think I have enough scars to prove my point. So let's review a few items that will keep your profitability high and your frustration low.

First you must ask the question “just because we can integrate it, should we”? Many click happy programmers and geeky business owners fail on this first question. The urge to integrate something and get it on the client's panel is so strong that nobody ever asks if it even makes sense. Think long and hard about what features and functions that you are going to attempt to integrate and then closely examine the liability that you might be introducing into the equation by allowing your client access to certain sub-system types. Remember that one of your most important services is protecting your client from him or herself.

Second, think long and hard about what it is you are selling and how to be profitable when integrating any sub-system. After all most times the only equipment sale for you is the serial or Ethernet cable from your processor to the sub-system. The contractor is providing all the hardware so the only thing you are providing is your programming expertise. Make sure you charge accordingly and that the functional scope expectations have been clearly communicated with the client. You would be amazed at how much time you can spend integrating something like a lighting control system when the client says (after the fact) that they want individual raise and lower controls…for all 324 loads in the system.

Most importantly make sure that there is a clear understanding that you will not touch the sub-system in question until the contractor has certified that the system is programmed, calibrated and operating properly on its own . This is an important point and it gets glazed over by integrators that are anxious to get stuff working. If you touch a sub-system before it has been given the green light and later there are performance issues with that system, well guess what? You are going to get associated with being part of the problem. Sure you can sit there on a drywall compound bucket programming away and insist all day long that your program couldn't possible be part of the issue. Well that's been tried before and let me assure you, better to stay away and ensure that the system is accepted by the client or G.C. before you so much as walk near it. Get it in writing, find a witness, just what ever you do don't get involved with it prematurely.

As mentioned above there is the matter of liability when tying into any system that you are not installing. Just ask yourself questions that include phrases like “life safety” or “Loss of life or personal property”. These are phrases that should quickly put into perspective the systems that you might not want to integrate. Some famous examples here are security systems and anything motorized like a garage door or driveway gate. You should check with your legal council and establish company policies regarding integration with these sub-systems. You will be glad that you did later. Should a wealthy client suffer a loss you can bet the insurance company is going to sweep up any and all parties that it can attach to a law suit for recovering losses. In the case of anything motorized just think about getting a call from a client saying the garage door just crushed his brand new Porsche Cayman S or the motorized gate pinned their granddaughter to the pavement.

If you think I am joking or am blowing things out of proportion here are a few real world examples. The names have been removed to protect the not so innocent.

Pool contractor doesn't wire the suction and return line valves the same. Client changes from pool to spa mode on his touchpanel and promptly empties all the spa water into the pool, thus burning out the pump. Try disassociating yourself from that one.
Thermostats are functional and wired correctly, but have been connected to the wrong zones. The client selects mode off for the three season porch but is actually turning off the heat in the garage. Freezing and bursting water pipes to follow. Again the initiating device was your touchpanel, right?
Security system protocol is written so poorly that excessive polling for zone status actually takes points of protection offline long enough that you could open and close zones while the system is armed.
Programmer takes the chandelier winch off of the spring loaded center position off key switch and moves it to a lighting module. Then programs the module output with maintained instead of momentary logic. Inexplicably he also manages to put only a down button on the nearest keypad. Limit switch on the winch fails during the first test of the button and the property manager watches as the chandelier craters on the marble foyer floor. That $5 key switch in the foyer closet is looking pretty good right about now.
Integrator is asked to provide driveway enunciation. Decides to take the request to exit loop detector for the gate, remove the connection to the gate controller and run it to a digital input on his control processor. Then run a relay output back out to the gate. Having now interrupted a hardware safety interlock with a software layer the next time the program is not running or the processor is damaged the gate will close even if a vehicle is sitting on the loop in the path of the closing gate.

So next time please stay away from gimmickry. If you want to bite off that new sub-system, think first and then propose a solution that is profitable, safe and provides a measure of convenience for your client.

-Jim Felderman
President
ControlWorks Consulting, LLC

Disclaimer: ControlWorks is not an agent or employee of Crestron Electronics, Inc. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer. Product representations and capabilities may change and should be verified by the user independently. Images are the property of their respective owner.

A conflicted affair with a hand held remote

Jim Felderman — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:00:00 GMT

So in case you're not keeping track, Crestron now manufactures over 30 variations of touchpanels and hand-held remotes as well as an unspeakable quantity of keypads. This affords the Crestron integrator an opportunity to pick that perfect user interface for the application. The only question is "which one"?

As a Crestron Authorized Independent Programmer, or CAIP, I believe that the best service that I can provide to my Dealer base extends far beyond programming. With so many user interfaces in the mix and an ever growing list of SKU's coming down the production line I find much of my time is spent helping Dealers distilling the Crestron catalog down to a core set of products. No Dealer can ever be successful by selling a different product compliment into every project. That's called re-inventing the wheel, and doing it too often has a tendency to absorb all the profit in a job. So many Dealers appreciate our ability to couple knowledge we have about the Crestron line with what we know of their business to help shed some light on an appropriate product mix.

For many years all us programmers salivated about the next coming touchpanel model. Believe it or not color was a big deal at one point, and when I say color I mean all 8 that we had to choose from at the time! Composite video on the panel was another, now we are gathering steam! And so as the Crestron user interfaces gained in functionality a funny thing happen; I wanted a remote in my hand. A good ol' AA battery driven remote. After the huge resolutions, expandable memory, Ethernet and other killer features arrived I found that panels were getting harder and hard to do the single thing that end users do the most of...watching television.

As almost every portal for watching live TV, recorded TV, DVD, Blu-Ray and IPTV evolved a common thread was developing. The appearance of the on-screen menu or navigation became the de facto standard for getting around the media. So I watched with discomfort as my end users looked down at the touchpanel, pressed menu, then they looked up at the display, then they looked down and pressed left, then they looked up at the display. Well this didn't go on for very long before I realized that all these devices needed to be navigated with a tactile remote that fit in the user's hand. That way the user, once they learned the "feel" of the remote could drive with one hand, without looking at the UI and without having to be constantly moving their attention from device to device.

Thus begins my love affair with the Crestron ML-600 . Yes I know it's an older model, yes I know it's a one-way RF device. But there is one thing that I do know. The thing is bomb-proof, the batteries last a life time compared to your cellphone and you know what? Most people can navigate with this simple little device tacitly! But, as a system integrator you must think I have lost my mind not selling plenty of those big shiny touchpanels. Not completely. I feel strongly that any large project should have no more than 3 resolutions of UI's. Any more and you are asking the end user to move from UI to UI all the while needing to remember the capabilities of each. The first step in UI selection for me is to put a ML-600 in every room that has a TV. Yup, that's right every room. That way the end user can lie down, slouch in their chair or even run on the tread mill and still be able to control the volume, mute and menu functions with out looking at a touchpanel. Next in the selection process are the wall mounted touchpanels. Hopefully you have landed a project where you have been able to educate your client on the benefits of having a wall mounted TP in each zone. And please don't sell the client one UI and tell him that "it can run the whole house"! That is topic for another post. So once you have put a remote in their hand and one on the wall it is time to focus on what I call the anchor panels. Again, since you have landed a project with a decent budget you have every sub-system imaginable. Systems to be integrated include lighting, HVAC, security, cameras, the whole smash. So to be able to give the end user enough real-estate to get around the detail of these systems you need some anchor panels. These are typically tilt models that should be in the theater, kitchen, master bedroom or any other areas where the folks who sign the checks spend the most time. So everyone gets covered here. The non-directional hand held remote that is tactile, the in-wall UI to cover room audio and the sub-system basics and the anchor panels to support the whole project.

So at CEDIA 2009 enter the Crestron TPMC-3X . Oh god, its an ML-600 with a touchpanel bolted to it! Now how do I treat this? Well reports from the field look pretty promising so you can sell the TPMC-3X in place of a ML-600 and still keep to the above concept. The 3X has a few things going for it. First of all is is a two way RF device. That takes care of the directional drawback of an IR remote. Next the industrial design of the 3X allows you to fit it in one hand and still get around! Further, no propriatery gateway is needed, but it is recommended for support reasons that you use the Crestron CEN-WAP-ABG-1G or CEN-WAP-ABG-CM access points, but you would need those anyway to provide WI-FI coverage for the end user. Other things that the 3X has going for it include good battery life, support for streaming video, back-lighting of the buttons and an assortment of docking options . There is more, but that is a good start.

So my beloved ML-600 has some serious competition. I so want the ML-600 experience to stay the way it is and always has been. However I do find myself gazing at that sleek glossy jet black wrapper on the 3X and feel like I have to come clean the next time I pick up my ML-600. I am indeed conflicted. While it is tactile, and a touchpanel, we as programmers need to be mindful of what we try to stuff onto the 3X's 76,800 pixels. End users aren't going to be happy if they are flipping through 15 pages trying to schedule their 10 HVAC zones so make every pixel count. Please use that 2-way 802.11 RF power sparingly! Don't get all giddy because you are no longer limited to 5 characters for naming each function. Find a balance between just enough feedback and controls and making the UI far too cumbersome. After all you owe it to the simple elegance of the ML-600.

-Jim Felderman
President
ControlWorks Consulting, LLC

Analog's sunset really Digital Media's sunrise?

Jim Felderman — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:15:00 GMT

I am sure that many of you have at least heard about the "sunset" of analog video. For those of you selling, installing, or programming centrally-distributed video systems the date December 31, 2010, can have different meanings. If you are a glass-half-full type, then the date represents an opportunity. If you are a glass-half-empty type, then it means your phone is going to start ringing...with unhappy end users. Time to start planning.

All of this is especially true for those of you in the residential market. You see, the consumer electronics industry came up with this idea that the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Association should shepherd in the new digital formats and how those formats get protected. So content end-points like Blu-Ray and anyone else who is an AACS licensee are going to start to behave a bit differently come year end. If the device you are watching is compliant with the new rules, then the highest analog resolution you will ever be able to view on the device is going to be 480i or 480p. Wow, 480p on my Panasonic TH-103 plasma - won't that look nice! Let's be clear here, this is not a case of the devices trying to use the HDMI and the analog output at the same time. It means the analog outputs will never have any aspirations of being anything better than 480.

So what does this mean specifically for Crestron Dealers out there? Well, if you have a PVID and RMC/RMCLV based installation out there, some of those sources you are distributing around the house are potentially going to go from 1080i to 480i. It really all depends on how the licensee has adhered to the license setup by the AACS. At this point your client will only be able to enjoy resolutions higher than 480 if they have a source connected directly to a display, like a Blu-Ray player in the room. Anything pushed through the PVID is going to look a whole lot worse.

Fear not, there are some options out there. The first step would be to get yourself to Crestron and get some training on their new Digital Media system. This wickedly powerful product line may save your bacon on existing installations, one small issue though...wire length. In DM land the connection between the DM-MD matrix (PVID) and the DM-RMC-100-F is based on three wires; CAT5E, STP, and a cable that looks in construction something like Cresnet. So if you have a PVID installation running, that means that you have at least one CAT5E and a Cresnet cable running to the room. If you look at page 14 of Crestron's chock full o'nuts design guide , you will find yourself a chart that outlines what resolutions DM can push at over various lengths of CAT5E. So if you are in a home with no option for retrofit, consider this table will be your new sales tool.

If you are designing a new system around a PVID or any other CAT5 balanced analog video kind of system, stop. You are setting yourself up for failure. Like it or not DRM on the video and film content is here to stay. I highly doubt that the studios and networks are going to drop the fight and allow you to make bit-for-bit Deep Color clones of "Hurt Locker" any time soon. So embrace Crestron Digital Media as soon as you can. At its heart it is still "only" a video switcher. The challenges that lie ahead for you relate to implementation, not programming. Getting everyone in the HDMI universe to play together can be a challenge, but the end results are nothing short of spectacular.

-Jim Felderman
President
ControlWorks Consulting, LLC

Welcome to the new ControlWorks site

Jim Felderman — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Well it took a monumental amount of effort but we finally got the new site online. While we have spent a good bit of effort testing everything there are bound to be some bits missing here and there. We would greatly appreciate your help in resolving any issues you are having getting around the site or managing your online accounts. Please contact me via email jim@controlworks.com with your issue and we will see to it that it gets addressed promptly.

The goal of the new site was not just a html face lift but one of expanding the site into a resource for Crestron Dealers. We have been providing bullet proof modules for eight years and we thought it was time to bring some more to the table. For starters we wanted to create a place where the most commonly asked module questions could get answered on a 24/7 basis. Now you can go check our Module FAQ any time to see information as it relates to each module product. You will find information here that you might not necessarily find in the module help file.

We also thought it was time to share some of our knowledge with the community. Our White Paper Library, while a little thin now (okay so there is no content there) will offer some insight from more basic applications to more advanced content that will hopefully be of value to you all. The new site also introduces what I am sure will be a popular category of modules, Freebies! Packaging some of the applications we use internally and posting them for your use, aren't we swell?

And of course I will be contributing blog posts as pertinent topics come to mind. Feel free to contact me at the address above if you have specific offline requests or post a comment.

The new site is based on a CMS from Sitefinity. I really like the product and would recommend it for any of you considering moving your site to a content management system. And finally my thanks to my staff and to MK2 Technologies for porting our old site and store into its new format. Stay tuned it can only get better from here!

Thanks for visiting! -Jim Felderman

Disclaimer: ControlWorks is not an agent or employee of Crestron Electronics, Inc. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer. Product representations and capabilities may change and should be verified by the user independently. Images are the property of their respective owner.