SMART RESIDENTIAL CONTROL WITH REDUNDANCY
Since 2001 residential Crestron programming projects have been a staple of our business. As such, we’ve developed well-established methods for providing whole house control and building redundancy into systems where appropriate. Over the years we’ve delivered Crestron systems to athletes, movie and television stars, and local business leaders. The homeowners of this Poway residence own and operate a very popular, award winning restaurant in San Diego. This project was completed with San Diego-based Crestron dealer Land and Sea Entertainment.Using their iPad, the homeowners can control their whole-house audio system, sending their favorite music to any room and controlling each room’s volume independently if desired. We leveraged the power of Crestron’s Sonnex digital audio distribution products to deliver centralized control. The homeowners can also control their security system and view streaming surveillance video feeds seamlessly on the iPad.
Apart from whole-house control, the residence also includes three Crestron MC3-based systems. Each system, located in the master bedroom, family room and great room, provides local control of TVs and audio visual equipment. Each of these systems is networked allowing additional house-wide control. In addition, the iPad can control each of these systems from anywhere in the house. However, each system has been programmed to operate independently as well. So even if the network goes down, each of the 3 systems can still function independently, allowing for uninterrupted control of the respective rooms.
Leveraged Crestron’s 3-series products allowed integration with Crestron’s MTX-3, a handheld remote with touch screen. The MTX-3 features a back lighted 2.8 inch touch screen. As such it allows for flexible, customized menus and control functionality; something that standard hard button remotes can’t do. But the challenge with small touch screens is to smartly design the control and navigation schemes. Making it easy for the homeowner to access the functionality they want while providing a clean, uncluttered interface, is important on such a small screen. Otherwise the user experience is greatly diminished. For this project, we developed the user interface using a customized version of our Titanium touch panel template.
Communication between the Creston control systems and the wireless touchpanel remotes is handled with Crestron’s infiNET EX® Wireless Control. infiNET is a 2.4 GHz RF wireless network that uses a mesh network technology. As such, system communications are not susceptible to the same issues common to traditional networked devices. And the individual room control systems aren’t affected by hiccups in network gear like routers, switches and wireless access points (WAPs).
Services
- System Design Consulting
- Control System Programming
- User Interface Design & Development
- User Experience Design (UX)
- End-user Training
- Whole System Commissioning
Project Profile
Complete Crestron control system for distributed audio, security and local room control.
Type: Residential Crestron Programming
Category: Residential
Location: Poway, CA