| ECS-L Home Automation and Security Archives |
| Subject: From: Date: | RE: [ECS] IR Distribution Dan Butterfield Tue, 19 Dec 2000 15:40:26 -0600 |
You're right in that Xantech thinks primarily of collecting IR from multiple sources, and bringing it back to a single place where emitters control a collection of equipment. This fits the model where you have a media cabinet full of equipment you want to control from multiple rooms in a house, but doesn't easily extend to more complicated environments. After talking to Xantech about what I wanted to do (e.g. have multiple rooms where there were multiple peices of equipment, plus have some output zoning to support the SECU-IR), and being told I had an overly complicated environment, I came up with an approach that works for me. Basically, I took advantage of the fact that I have cat-5 running between all the rooms I am using IR with (which I planned on using for hardwired IR), and that there are 8 conductors in cat-5, whereas Xantech IR signals only need two or three conductors. I have three rooms (a media room, a family room, and a wiring closet where my Ocelot is located) where I wanted a bunch of emitters, so I used a "backbone" of a Xantech 791-44 in the media room, daisy chained to two 790-10's in the wiring closet and the family room via the "high IR" connectors. This used 3 of the 8 cat-5 conductors between those rooms. In all the rooms I have IR receivers (I used Xantech 291 mini tabletop receivers), I used 3 more conductors to bring those signals back to the IR bus in the normal Xantech 3-wire connections. Finally, I used 2 conductors to provided a dedicated IR output from one of the SECU-IR outputs to each room - basically, just a remote emitter. This results in a single merged zone for IR input (which works for me, since I distinguish commands in different zones where needed by using different IR signals on different remotes in those zones, and matches what the Ocelot can handle), but allows multiple output zones for duplicated equipment (like cable boxes) in different rooms. I'm attaching a diagram (from Visio) that shows how this is connected (click on "House IR Routing.htm" to start). It has one page per room, and connections between rooms are shown labeled by unique letters). It also shows a Russound PR4Z multi-room audio controller that can receive IR from its wall mounted keypads; this actually ended up being a Kustom controller that essentially does the same thing (from the IR perspective). It all actually works, but it was a hassle making all the RJ-45 to multiple mono- / stereo- mini jack connectors that were needed (referred to as "cat-5 splitter" in the diagram). - Dan Butterfield (dan@butterfields.net)