Homeseer Hometroller

I am designing for new construction of a 4000 Sq Ft house. I am planning to use a Homeseer Hometroller to control an ELK M1G for security, VIZIA RF for lighting, Russound MCA for Audio/Video, and RCS Thermostats for HVAC. I will connect these devices via the serial port.
I am assuming that all programming can be done on the Hometroller to manage Scenes, temperature set-backs, audio/video distribution and the like. Minimum programming would be required on the local devices other than device setup. Am I missing something? Can this headend hardware manage the entire house? Are there other configurations I should consider?

Yep, Homeseer can do all of this. I would probably also look at the Z-Troller, which is a pretty impressive Z-Wave interface.

http://www.cocoontech.com/wiki/Premise is a free option to explore that works with the devices you've listed. It's a very open platform and 100% stable.

If you have questions about Premise direct them here:
http://www.cocoontech.com/forums/index.php?showforum=51

For a small form factor PC, take a look at these options:
http://www.newegg.com/Store/BrandSubCategory.aspx?Brand=12730&SubCategory=386&name=Habey-Server-Systems

Welcome to the forum Jayday!

You'll find the users here friendly and a forum with much information relating to your endeavor.

I'm using a similiar combo. The Elk is a very good system.

I've used Homeseer now since the late 1990's/early 2000's and the HAI OPII panel around 6-7 years. Most of my Homeseer connections except for a few are direct serial connections. Here's an older drawing of my setup. The drawing needs to be updated some.

ZoneMinder looks interesting. What type of PC are you running it on? Does it allow interfacing of triggers with HS over IP?

Zoneminder is now a 8 port analogue/4 port IPCam DVR of sorts. I've been using Zoneminder now for many years.

Recently moved it to a Core-Duo 4GB machine when it started to work a bit more with the IPCams. It's basically streaming and recording defined events 24/7. It talks to Homeseer (or any other XAP Hub) using a program called ZoneminderXAP. The XAP transport broadcasts all of what's happening on the Zoneminder box. When an event gets triggered on the Zoneminder box then it triggers events on the Homeseer box and vice versa. You can manually trigger an event via XAP from Homeseer to Zoneminder. Just recently a Homeseer user (Zap) modified a perl script to combine all of the events of the day in a nice short mp4 video. Its free and it has a large userbase. It would be easy to integrate into Premise. I wrote a kind of "receipe" to build it using a script (modified a bit) with a base of Ubuntu 10.10 on the Homeseer forum. Basically you are just installing Ubuntu via the ISO, setting up the HW video card (found a source in China - very reasonable for an 8 port card), running the script and tweaking it a bit. I don't run a front end GUI but just basically manage the box via Webmin.

Here's a snapshot showing the frame rates minus one IPCam from couple of months back. I've tweaked down the frame rate on the analogue cams to 25FPS. The montage view give you motion on all 12 windows.

Thanks! Zoneminder looks like it will be my next project as I'm wanting a front door camera. It would also be neat to use the camera to capture motion as a means to: trigger a door bell and turn the porch lights on.

I don't think it would be hard to build a XAP module for Premise; I'll have to study the protocol though.

XAP applications have already been built for Windows/Linux. Zoneminder is what got me into the Linux/DVR world. You can pick up an import analogue card very reasonably.

All you have to do is run an XAP hub on your premise server.