So, the first “real” post …….. and it’s actually an old one! Below is an article that I wrote for the Automated Home web site back in July 2010.
Things have changed a fair bit since then, but this is as good a place to start as any!
I’ve posted the original article along with the full sized images (the AH version was a shorter edit).
Four Nodes
We moved to our current house in 1999 and being in IT and a bit of a gadget geek, I started to dabble in all things Home Automation.
By around 2003 I’d appropriated bedroom four to use as a home office / Node Zero and over the preceding years I’d installed CAT5 on a room-by-room basis as renovations / decoration was carried out. All the CAT5 had been run back to this room and was terminated in a modest wall mounted comms cabinet. My general rule of thumb for CAT5 has been eight connections per room, typically grouped in quads in close proximity to power sockets.
I had a variety of servers / equipment in the office at that time, as well as a couple of PCs (nice and toasty in the summer!) and things were just peachy!
The arrival of our first child had negligible impact on all things “hobby” related and various “projects” came and went (some even got finished!)
But then, in 2006 my wife fell pregnant with our second child and suggested (read that as “demanded”) that bedroom four would need to become my three year old daughter’s bedroom so that the pending baby could have bedroom three as the nursery.
Bedroom two at the time was a guest room and I was told “you can use that as an office as long as it can still be used as a guest room”! Gee thanks! Well at least I wasn’t made to move into a shed in the garden!
So the upshot of all of that was that I needed to move Node Zero to somewhere else, downsize my office to a corner of a bedroom, while maintaining the cabling that I’d already installed. Oh and re-decorate three bedrooms along the way as well!
Now, some 5 years have passed since then and things have changed significantly and my HA equipment is now split across four separate locations (Node Zero through Node Three)! What follows is a rough overview of those Nodes and details of some of the functions and facilities that make up our Smart Home.
Thanks for reading,
Martyn Wendon