Integrated systems allow for control of home gadgetry by smartphone

Luxury high-end homes have many beautiful and sensual features, including exotic woods, illuminated glass, sculpted stonework, soothing water, aromatic landscapes, decorative art and scenic views.

However, some of a luxury home’s more elaborate features are invisible and operate quietly in the background to subtly shape the living space.

Welcome to the brave new world of smart electronic ecosystems that can anticipate and envelop you, wherever you choose to go.

Several established service providers have led the development of home automation over the last decade, including Crestron, Control4, AMX, Extron, Vantage Controls and Lutron Electronics.

Crestron Las Vegas opened a regional office and “Crestron Experience Center” in 2008 on Howard Hughes Parkway, after the company had sold multiple audio/visual and automation systems to local casinos for its VIP rooms.

“Creston has expanded its markets beyond the hospitality industry to include residential, military, education and corporate office applications, as well,” branch manager Paul Adams said.

Technical staff members at Crestron Las Vegas support customer sites in Nevada and regions in Utah and California. The regional office also trains dealers and partners who service the company’s regional customers through the Crestron Technical Institute.

These interactive systems can deliver a vast array of luxury amenities that are available from every room of a luxury home at the touch of a fingertip, including entertainment, security and environmental controls. These systems can also be controlled remotely through an owner’s smartphone or from inside a car.

Ram Reddy is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who recently listed his $3.85 million home in Henderson with Synergy Sotheby’s International Realty. Reddy employed Eagle Sentry and HP Media Group to integrate a Crestron home automation system into a home that already had many automated features, including extensive lighting, media screens, sound systems, water features, motorized shades at multiple windows and motorized sliding glass pocket doors.

“Crestron is a billion-dollar company that spends a lot of resources on research to integrate its control system with tested products from multiple industries,” HP Media Group’s Kevin Peltier said.

“The motorized sliding glass pocket doors were a real accomplishment by HP Media,” said Reddy, who can now use his iPad to control the Crestron-enabled features in the Henderson home from Silicon Valley.

His single-family home covers 11,460 square feet. Home automation makes the living space easier to manage and enjoy.

Michael Lemke worked as an information technologies director at Stations Casinos before starting his own company, Progressive Homes LLC, in 2001. His company has installed more than 9,000 home-automation systems throughout the valley.

Lemke has recently explored integrating his smart home and workplace with a smart car. He and his wife own Tesla Motors Model S electric sedans that they recharge at night from two high-power recharging stations in two garages.

Lemke’s Tesla Motors Model S hosts its own set of in-car applications that make commuting from home to work a luxury experience. When driving home, the Model S uses its GPS system to sense when it is near the garage entrance and automatically pops up a menu on its touch screen to signal the garage door opener.

“I still enjoy coming up with fresh applications for new technologies as they emerge,” Lemke said.

Access to this electronic ecosystem by homeowners must be secure from outside intrusion through encrypted communications and a strong firewall, yet it should be simple to use through an intuitive human interface, like push buttons on a nearby wall panel, a touch-screen tablet by a couch, motion sensors, voice commands or by remote control touch from the owner’s mobile phone.

Most luxury homes use a dedicated server and electronics switch modules to connect all features throughout the house. The server and electronics components are usually stacked on a mobile rack inside a small service closet. New homes may contain miles of copper wire that carry power and data signals to electronics devices mounted in every room.

Custom-built homes adhere to the National Electrical Code and its low-voltage building standards. Information-age wiring systems enable high-speed digital communications. These include Category 5e unshielded twisted-pair cabling systems for telephone and computer systems, as well as RG-6 quad-shielded coaxial cables that carry digital video signals.

A state-of-the-art home automation system can include integrated applications for:

ENTERTAINMENT

Sophisticated light-emitting diode lighting can be adjusted to different levels of white light intensity throughout every room in the house; it can also change to any color of the spectrum through a combination of red, green and blue elements. Colored LED lighting can be programmed for sequential effects during a social gathering.

Audio speakers can be omnipresent throughout the home, even blended into the landscape areas by the patio and swimming pool. Custom playlists with favorite music can be programmed to softly emerge in the background at specific times of the day or at full volume, front and center, during a party. Some luxury homes have their own disc jockey booth, recording studio or performance stage for social events, with specialty wall connectors mounted to accommodate audio performance equipment.

For those preferring a visual entertainment experience, homes can be equipped with ultrahigh-definition-resolution, flat-screen televisions in every room, large-scale video walls, and intimate home movie theaters with 7.2-speaker surround sound, acoustic paneling, and a wide-screen projector. Advanced home entertainment systems can stream and switch ultrahigh-definition-resolution video at 10 gigabits per second to multiple rooms from multiple sources in the building.

SECURITY

Security cameras, intercoms and sensors are the home’s eyes, ears and nose. Motion detectors can monitor human activity to turn on localized lights at a “not-too-bright” intensity just ahead of a nighttime trip to the bathroom.

Security cameras record the presence of visitors and allow a doorbell ring at the front entrance to be viewed and answered through an intercom from any touch-screen control panel in the house.

If no one is home and the visitor intrudes on the owners’ personal space, sensors and security alarms can trigger flashing lights, activate warning sounds, respond with preprogrammed voices or dog barks, and send a quick digital signal to the nearest local security guard service.

The security system can also monitor excess temperature and unhealthy air in all areas in the home in case of fire or carbon dioxide emissions. Sensors can even monitor a wine room for excess temperature and send out a service alarm if the ambient air temperature exceeds a predetermined threshold.

ENVIRONMENT

Temperature controls in a house can be “zoned” for different rooms to dial in the right level of comfort throughout the day

Automated motor control is a popular feature for automatically moving blinds, curtains and light shading during hot summer days in the Mojave Desert. Motor controls can also be connected to a home movie projection screen that drops down from the ceiling. A flat- screen television mount can be motorized to rotate horizontally 180 degrees so the video screen can be viewed from any corner of the room, or pop up from within a furniture cabinet.

Motor automation can also turn on sprinkler and irrigation valves at preprogrammed times for landscape watering. Pool, spa and water feature pumps can also be tied into the home automation system to start water flowing and then turn off after a predetermined time.

A centralized vacuum system can make house cleaning easy and avoid the need to have multiple vacuum cleaners with cumbersome extension cords stowed in multiple service closets throughout the home. One central vacuum unit in the garage or laundry room is connected to an extensive plumbed network of vacuum ducts in the walls, with fittings mounted in every room for interchangeable cleaning attachments. Even a dustpan is unnecessary; a grated slit in the floorboard can be opened to suck dust from a broom into the vacuum ducts behind the wall.

As a family grows, a home automation system should continue to be expandable and upgradeable, allowing for customization of new devices and features as technology also evolves.

The Custom Electronic Design &Installation Association promotes standardization among professional service providers within the home automation industry: http://www.cedia.net/about

The association offers training and certification to member companies to encourage the use of best practices. The association also hosts an annual trade show and product exhibition.

Buyers of home automation systems should consider the reliability of the service company’s partner vendors and the company’s industry affiliations, to ensure continuous support over time.

For example, a buyer might ask,

■ What happens when utility power becomes disconnected due to grid power outage or an accidental breakdown?

■ Is there a backup system that allows all the interconnected devices and environmental controls to continue functioning until power is restored?

■ Once restored, do settings have to be reinitialized and restarted?

■ How easily can the system reboot itself and continue operating with minimum human intervention?

Connecting all of a home automation control system’s components and software requires a systems integrator who is a custom programmer, skilled in user-interface design, control systems, event-driven programming, audio/visual technologies and construction project management.

Over the last 10 years, Lemke has seen home automation technology expand in multiple directions. This has made it hard to create one system that can be integrated into just one “app” throughout the home that can also be accessed remotely through a user’s mobile phone.

“As electronics technologies for the home market have exploded, many manufacturers now embed software systems into their hardware products,” Lemke said. “This makes the appliance more self-contained and easier to integrate into a custom application. Each manufacturer is now writing their own mobile phone ‘app’ to serve as a front end to the embedded software functions in each device.”

System hardware can include a computer server, high-resolution video monitors, movie projectors, sound amplifiers, mixers, lights, security cameras, smart thermostats, motion sensors, motorized shades, water valves, pool pumps, electronic signal switch boxes, and more.

Lemke recommends his customers create custom “groups” on their mobile phones and their home automation control systems. Each group contains a set of “apps” with related functions like lighting, music, motorized shade controls, television and movie theater menus, temperature, air quality, and water features. The user can then navigate to a specific “group” category that gathers similar apps together, and quickly find the relevant control menu for an individual device.

This two-step approach allows for more customization and system flexibility at lower cost. Software updates should automatically appear on a customer’s mobile phone or tablet, without the local service provider’s intervention.

However, no system is perfect.

On the day of our interview, a recent upgrade to Apple iOS 8 for the company’s new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus mobile phones had temporarily created glitches to some remote interface apps on earlier iPhone models. Some homeowners with Apple mobile phones could not access their home control systems remotely after upgrading to the iOS 8 operating system. They needed to either return to the iOS 7 operating system, or wait until iOS 8 had been upgraded with another round of software changes. Fortunately, all control panels installed inside customer homes continued to function normally on Linux operating systems.

Linus Torvalds created the open-source Linux “kernel” of computer code in 1994, to make it easier for programmers to create their own dedicated operating systems that could link together multiple hardware devices, programs and applications. Twenty years later, he must be amazed at all the diverse computing systems that the open-source movement has created.