nayr's home automation build out...

[nayr]

that make an offer button on ebay is really nice, see my tip above.. Ive cleaned out my share of datacenters, it just gets picked up by these guys for scrap weight and resold on ebay.. I'll probably be taking a load there in a few weeks when I recycle a few dozen pieces of equipment.

the problem with old DC stuff is the power price, got my 3com switch for free.. but it eats power running constantly.. I have 2 30A Circuits so I have plenty of power, just dont want to use it if I dont need to.

 

[nayr]

shh, dont tell my old lady.. just landed a nice Niles SI 1230, a 12ch Amp for multi-room audio distribution.. now I can properly hookup the outdoor speakers (80w @ 8ohm), and the ones in the garage too and have room for a few more sets of speakers throughout the house too.

Yesterday I took out all my old PDU's and installed a pair of AVOCENT CYCLADES PM10-20A PDU's in the bottom of my equipment cabinet, each one has its own 15A circuit coming out of my 30A UPS and combined I now have 20 switched ports in my cabinet that I can control remotely.. all of these will get hooked up to Domoticz so I can cycle equipment on/off and in a lightning storm shut down anything sensitive automatically.. They also have current monitors built in so now I know exactly how much power I am using, about 960w (8A) max right now for the entire server room.. Tested the primary UPS's run time with full load on it, got about 3mins out of it heh.. but thats enough time for the servers to all safely shutdown.. and why I am setting up a transfer switch to the secondary UPS with only the absolute minimum equipment on it.

Confirmed by beastly 3com backbone is using a full amp of power at idle.. the new Dlink switch coming in should reduce my load quite a bit.. especially for the critical stuff on the transfer switch.

keep in mind those power consumption numbers are basically all my electronics on at the same time, from home theatre to the workstation in my office are running through that cabinet now.. trying to get them down, but it'll take time.. and now I can see the progress I make through logs pretty graphs.

 

[thesleepy_slee]

Hello nayr, small question: I have seen you modified domoticz to add motion sensors.
How do you handle this, both from domoticz standpoint (only with Lua?) and hardware standpoint (ex: do you use PIR?)

 

[nayr]

im not following, domoticz has native support for motion sensors.. im using a few Z-Wave ones out of the box and a few bosh tritech motion sensors hardwired to GPIO ports on PI's which also are natively supported.. I didnt add anything in that regard, other than hacking my video cameras to be motion sensors.

 

[thesleepy_slee]

Exactly: can you explain a bit more how you hacked your cameras to become motion sensors or "Only" with those Lua scripts?

Also if you have some references for good PIR sensors, would be appreciated too. Thanks.

 

[nayr]

In summary I wrote a program to connect to the cameras and subscribe to motion events, then the program controls dummy motion sensor devices in Domoticz.. its the bridge between the cameras and domoticz.

everything is here: https://github.com/nayrnet/domoticz-ipcc

Bosh and Optex are whom I trust for PIR, but I try to avoid PIR only unless its got really good processing.. I prefer muti technology units with PIR+RF (microwave)

 

[thesleepy_slee]

OK thanks, I understand better now. I will look at hikvision, how I can retrieve PIR status and hook it up to domoticz. I haven't looked that much at alarms yet.

 

[nayr]

I started work to try to get Hikvision cams working, but the API is more of a pain than it should be and I gave up... it dont send any end of motion event that I could get, would trigger motion.. then never be told that motion stopped, so could only just time it out after a while.. i dont have hik cameras so i only had limited time to try to implement it, I thought it'd be easy like Dahua from the docs I read but it was not.

Domoticz has numerous ways to handle dry contacts, Raspberry Pi's GPIO's are supported out of the box, you could hook it up to a Z-Wave dry contact, RFXCom, relay boards with lan interfaces, MySensors nodes.. or some other way if you want with Lua, JSON, MQTT, etc.. suggest you go to the Domoticz forums and wiki for guidance.

 

[gpower07]

wow...you are so smart...I almost read very thing you post.

 

[nayr]

tore all my racks down to bare, cleaned em up, put em back together, rewiring it all now.. teaser:

 

[thesleepy_slee]

Lol, why do you have so much hardware?

 

[nayr]

lol thats just a small glimpse, these racks hold my entire AV/Home Theatre system, all my HAM Radio Gear, Personal FileServer, Personal WebServer, Home Automation System, Alarm System, Video Security System, Telephone System, etc.. it all terminates in one place.. its kinda a bit of chaos right now as I am completely restructuring everything, its about time since I've appended and retired so much stuff since the last time.

I used to pay alot of money to colocate my servers in other people's racks, now I have adequate enough bandwidth at home for my needs so I moved it all in-house.. no more trekking through a blizzard to reboot a hung server.. Both me and my wife work from home, I try to keep everything onsite as possible so alot of work is done on these boxes, and all our backups, etc. Also any self-respecting network engineer has to have a home lab to play with complicated setups and new technologies.. and seriously, Ive hiked a half mile through white-out conditions at 3am on foot because the private road to the datacenter was unpassable at the time.. ah the shit we do for uptimes.

I spend so much time around computers I value silence, If you've ever heard the inside of a datacenter you'd understand.. when I am at home I cant stand to hear anything running, so I had to build a room to store it all in and spend great efforts soundproofing it so I could sleep in peace and quiet All my stuff is hidden and secured out of sight, the only thing in the living room is the TV and some discretely mounted speakers.. not a wire or piece of hardware to be seen.

All you see in that photo are the rear end of my 3 servers, top one is old retired media server.. unused currently, will be upgraded and replace one of the others likely.. the middle one is my webserver, its doing my alpr stuff and hosting all my websites and other junk.. the bottom one is my 24TB FreeNAS, its the heart of my network and home theatre system.

then 2 switched pdu's w/a meter, each with a 15A dedicated circuit feeding into a 30A APC UPS.

thats about 1/3rd of the gear, and some of the least interesting of it.. and ive trimed so much fat out, You should see the pile of computers I am hauling away to the recyclers, its going to fill my trailer up hah..

 

[thesleepy_slee]

Thanks, now I have confirmation you are really crazy...

More seriously, you are doing great stuff. I would benefit from having a listing of your hardware like cameras, sensors, etc... on the first page. I like the way you use sensors to manage your cameras, I have seen your advice on rf+pir but these seem pricey.

 

[TechBill]

so its time to attack my cabinet with a mountain of zip ties and some new equipment.. I am doing a bit of restructuring, trying to move as much as I can now to PoE..

Retiring 12 Port PowerDsine 1214 (10/100) PoE Midspan that's currently at full capacity and replacing it with a 24 port PowerDsine 9024G PoE+ (GigE) midspan that can provide power to all my PTZ's and AC Access points.. picked this nice unit up used for $100

I am going to be splitting my patch panel and doing a patch panel dedicated to just PoE hardware.

Then I am going to move all the equipment I can in the house to PoE power, this includes:

• Comcast Business Cable Modem
• 3x Nexus Players
• Home Automation Server (cuBox) & GPIO NOdes
• Dahua NVR
• 3x Ubiquiti AC Access Points & 1 Outdoor Access Point
• 8 IP Cameras
• 6 VoIP Phones

This midspan talks to my APC UPS's, each device is given a priority (router/nvr/ha server = critical, most ipcameras = high, few unimportant cameras and most voip phones = low) and as the batteries are drained there is power envelope I have defined.. as the batteries get more and more drained it automatically powers down lower priority devices until its within the envelope.. this is part of the reason for moving alot of my stuff over to PoE is so I can use these features for providing external UPS management and get the capacity of both APC's combined.. another reason is to have a single DC power supply for all these little DC devices and get all these warts out of my cabinet/house.. it'll be more efficient and fault tolerant..

Nexus players are being put on PoE because I power on/off the bedroom TV's via Z-Wave outlets and dont want the nexus players to have to boot up every time, and sometimes they need to be restarted manually, which sucks because they are all tucked away and hard to reach.

I am pushing to upgrade my main switch to something a bit more power efficient and quieter soon, this 48 port GigE datacenter switch is a beast and drains the UPS faster than anything else since the NAS and WebServer will power down

Ive got to yank a few more ethernet cables through the house and completely rewire everything all nice and clean, with production services online this will be tricky to keep downtime low.. but I'll get you guys some serious geek porn here soon, break out the kleenex

Nexus player is PoE supported? I own a Nexus player and it doesn't even have a Ethernet port on mine.

Is there a different version of Nexus player?

Bill

 

[nayr]

OTG Ethernet Adapter, + PoE 12v Splitter

 

[tangent]

OTG Ethernet Adapter, + PoE 12v Splitter

Not PoE but I wonder if this works on the nexus player:
https://store.google.com/product/ethernet_adapter_for_chromecast
oops, nexus player has power jack and isn't powered off usb

 

[nayr]

this does: https://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Micro-B-Ethernet-Raspberry-AX88772A/dp/B00RM3KXAU/

 

[SyconsciousAu]

all my HAM Radio Gear.

How much interference do you pick up on your HF set from all the other gear in your rack?

 

[nayr]

I am not licensed for HF so, dunno really.. none of it interferes with VHF and up... I tune into HF without problems from time to time.. but I have a linear 60A power supply on a conditioner and this cabinet is full of copper grounds.. and this room has its own 220v subpanel with all the motors/fans running on the opposing phase.

 

[nayr]

here you guys go, first view into my server room.. still have more work to do, none of my VoIP phones are wired up and need to get a few more blank panels.

left rack: wiring cabinet (top to bottom)

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter + Comcast Business Modem
48 port cat6 patch panel - Whole house
12 Port PoE Midspan (about to be replaced with a 24 port)
D-Link 48 Port GigE Managed Switch
Bunch of Cat5e patch panels used as filler plates
Slide out Monitor & Keyboard
Tripp Lite PDU
Sentry Automatic Transfer Switch


​

right rack: equipment

Astron 60A Linear 12v Power Supply
Kenwood TS-2000 Radio
Niles SI-1230 12 Channel Amp
Exhaust Fan
Pioneer SC-1222K AVR
Retired C2D Hackintosh Mediaserver (spare capacity)
WebServer - Hex Phenom Black w/16GB RAM, GT950, 4x2TB SAS drives in Raid10, 64GB SLC SSD
FileServer - Hex Phenom Black w/16GB RAM, 4x6TB HGST Deskstar, 32GB SSD ZCache
APC 30A 3000VA UPS
APC 30A 3000VA UPS

not pictured; Pair of Cyclades Switched/Metered PDU's each with 15A circuit.
Dahua NVR4216-4k
HD HomeRun
CuBox
Raspbery Pi's
and other goodies hidden on shelves in wiring cabinet only accessible from rear door.​