Ok, so what am I doing? I bought the house in 1999 and I knew that I wanted a home theatre and to design a home automation system. The home automation system is a way of centralizing control of lights, heating and cooling, door locks, audio and video and whatever else I can think of. I became aware of the idea of computerized control probably around 15 years ago and at the time, the technology wasn't readily available and what was available, wasn't very mature. Now, there's a growing industry in home automation. Professional installers are charging big bucks (we're talking tens of thousands) to install customized systems but I know I can do it myself for a lot less and produce a solution that fits my needs.
Why am I doing this? For the most part, it's just for the plain fun of designing something like that. Yes, I find stuff like that fun. I'm a nerd, big deal! But how cool would it be? Sure, I could get timers to turn on the porch light before I get home from work in the winter or turn down the heat when I leave for work in the morning, but the timers won't know that it's a holiday or that I just decided to take a day off and stay home. My system will know.
So what does all that have to do with the basement? Well, I'm building the basement so I can have the home theatre to watch movies. The thing is, is that I don't want to have a bunch of stand-alone components just for that. I want it integrated into the home automation system. So that would give me the ability, for example, to pick a movie I want to watch, maybe while making dinner in the kitchen, and then after dinner simply going downstairs and tapping a single keypad. This will trigger the lights to dim, projector to power up and the movie to start playing. No futzing about turning this on and that on, digging through shelves of DVDs, etc... Or maybe someday just using a voice command.
So over the course of this year, I plan to have the basement finished with the home theatre installed, plus have much of the core home automation system designed and installed. I've been doing all of the construction myself but will get the carpet and bar installed professionally. For a lot of it, I'm learning as I go. I've made a few mistakes here and there but I can live with them. All of the home theatre and home automation software, I'm writing myself.
