Best design practices
flcusat
Posts: 309
I have some questions for you guys with more experience. When you design a system that consist of a main system (Theater Room plus house DA, DV, HVAC, Lighting Control, etc) and various subsystem with independent setups, for different parts of the property(Master Bedroom, Family room, etc), where the equipment for those subsystems are far apart from each other. What is the best approach regarding system design? Do you use different masters on each subsystem and use master to master if you want to control any of the elements on the main system from another subsystem or vice versa? Do you use one master for the main system and a Netlinx on every other subsystem? In case that the best practice would be master to master, would you dedicated just a master for the common stuff for the whole house like DA, DV, HVAC, Lighting Control etc? And one last question. Would you use just a dedicated LAN for the control system or you use a VLAN out of the existing network in the house?
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Comments
There really is no one best way, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve, budget, locale, reliability, speed and many other factors. For whole house control with many subsystems, typically it would all be connected to one master with perhaps some comm/IR/relay cards in shells on the ICS network. The only reason you may want another master is so you don't have a single point of failure, or so that you have a monitoring master, but that is uncommon on most installs due to budget. I have considered having HVAC, Lighting, and other subsystems on one master and all AV on another, but haven't needed to do this as system response and snappiness wasn't lacking.
As for the network, ideally you want the control system on its own network or at least on its own subnet so that control traffic isn't hampered by non real-time network activity. Usually this just requires another router or a VLAN and works well for most installs.
Paul