Well, there will be soon enough. I picked up a bunch of the electrical components from Home Depot today: electrical device boxes, outlets and four recessed lights to start. There was a new guy working in the electrical department so I had to explain to him how to install recessed lights. Nice guy, eager to learn. After the lesson, I sent him on his way to help some other customers.
Along with the electrical work, I also intend to run all the home theatre wiring. I ordered a 45 foot HDMI cable to connect the HTPC to the projector and 12 gauge speaker wire for the surround sound speakers. I got them from monoprice.com. They have really good prices and I got it delivered in about a week from the US. Both the HDMI and speaker wire are CL2 insulated which makes them ideal for in-wall installation because the insulation is slow to burn in case of fire.
I also want to install wiring for the internal sensor network that provides input to the home automation system. The sensors will measure temperature, humidity and light levels. The thermostat that controls the home HVAC (heating ventilation and air conditioning) system will also be computer controllable and I want to have the system use the temperature readings throughout the house to help regulate the operation of the furnace and air conditioning instead of just the thermostat in the hallway. In addition, wireless motion sensors will be installed and the intention is to have the system recognize which rooms are occupied and regulate the HVAC to optimize the temperature for those rooms. The heat vents in the basement will be contollable as well so when the basement is unoccupied, the system will close the vents, thus maximizing the heating or cooling air pressure to the upstairs. It's all theoretical and I won't really know if it'll work until I try it.
I need to run some tests on a set of wall mountable microphones and an automatic mixer to see if implementing voice recognition is feasible. If so, I'll go ahead and install those for future development. That system will consist of five wall mountable microphones that are specifically designed to be sensitive to human vocal frequencies thus reducing the pickup of ambient noise. The mixer automatically switches to the microphone that has the highest level input and feeds that source to the central PC for processing.
