Case Study: Connect and Control with the GC-100 and Chipmunk AV Controller

Wireless home networking has to be one of the great consumer electronics success stories of the last few years. It's popularity is indisputable. Just do a quick roam in your area to see the number of wireless networks up and running. In our residential street of 30 homes, there are no fewer than twelve wireless networks! Plug-and-play hardware has made it possible for home owners to install home networks with confidence and ease. The other success story has to be the take up of flat panel displays. Go into any department store today and you'll be hard pressed to find an old-style CRT TV. They're being replaced with flat screen panels, accompanied by all the latest A/V equipment and accessories. Home Networks and Home Cinema are no longer terms associated with the experts and the wealthy. They can be found in your neighbours' living rooms, providing entertainment, education, work-from-home connectivity and other essential services.

Connect & Control

Home networks and home entertainment systems are a given. The next step is to connect and take control...

Home computers, networks, and A/V systems are a given. But have you considered how they might be inter-connected to offer new levels of integration and control? Universal remotes are all very well and good for replacing banks of remote controls - but what if your equipment is out of line-of-sight, or distributed around the home? How, then, would you implement a unified control system? And what about those techno-phobic members of the household who are simply not comfortable with using an entertainment system that you have spent a good deal of time and money putting together? How can we leverage what’s already in the home to offer the next level of inter-connectivity and control without breaking the bank?

Introducing Global Caché’s GC-100 network adapter into a home network bridges the gap between PCs running on the network and A/V equipment distributed around the home. With its RS232 serial ports, IR transmitters, sensor input and relay connectors, pretty much any modern A/V component can be connected to the GC-100 which in turn can connect with a wired / wireless network on to a home computer or home theatre PC (HTPC). There's even a 19" rackmount version for a really professional looking installation. We like the solid, quality feel of these units - and they look great.

With a wireless home network any one of these components can be remotely located, offering great flexibility and customisation.

The GC-100 really does offer plug-and-play installation. It takes just a few minutes to connect a GC-100 to a network, assign an IP address (or accept the default) and fix the supplied stick-on IR emitters to your equipment. For serial control, standard male/female serial cables are used. These can be obtained from most computer stores. All that’s left is the control software - and that’s where Chipmunk AV Controller comes in.

Chipmunk is a software application that sits on a Windows PC and offers out-of-the-box support for the GC-100. Once installed on a networked PC, simply register the GC-100 with Chipmunk. Once registered, you can learn IR signals using Global Caché’s GC-IRL IR Learner accessory and store the signals as commands that can be replayed at any time. If you’re feeling adventurous you can also connect high-end equipment that supports RS232 serial control to the GC-100’s serial ports. Chipmunk can learn and transmit serial commands for ultra-reliable operation of your equipment. And all this can be done using Chipmunk’s attractive and intuitive user interface. You can normally obtain the serial control codes from the equipment manufacturer online.

The GC-100 IR ports can also be configured as sensor inputs. Global Caché supply a useful range of sensor accessories which can send notification messages to Chipmunk. When received by Chipmunk, these messages can trigger commands or macros to perform other tasks. With a little imagination you can ‘orchestrate’ quite sophisticated sequences of commands.

Connect & Control in Action

Gary Barnett, a home theatre enthusiast, has achieved some impressive results using several Global Caché GC-100 units and Chipmunk AV Controller, including: a wireless touch-screen interface with system status feedback; equipment control via IR and RS232 serial; and a robust plug-in framework for future multi-room expansion.

Gary’s set-up consists of a Mac Mini HTPC running Windows XP Professional and Chipmunk AV Controller. This is connected via the LAN to a central CAT5/Wi-fi hub, along with two GC-100-12 units. The first GC-100-12 is connected, via RS232 Serial, to a Sony CX777ES 400 disc changer, and a McIntosh MX135 Receiver. A McIntosh DVD player, Sony Blu-ray, and DirecTV DVR are connected via the IR ports using the supplied stick-on IR emitters. The second GC-100 unit is connected to the lighting system using a Lutron RA-RS232 interface, and finally a Pioneer Elite 61" plasma is connected via RS232 Serial.

Chipmunk enables you to group commands into folders - each folder representing an A/V component. Each command maps either to a serial control code or an infra-red code. In the case of the latter, Gary connected the GC-IRL IR Learner to one of the GC-100’s serial ports and learned each command from the original remote control handset. Chipmunk takes care of converting and storing the signals for subsequent transmission. In the case of the serial codes, it was a simple matter of copying the codes from the device's serial control specification document into Chipmunk's serial properties screen. Once all the codes are entered, they can be tested to make sure that each device operates as expected.

For the user interface Gary uses a Motion Control LE1600TS touch-screen running Windows XP Tablet Edition. This acts as the main remote control for the system and connects wirelessly to Chipmunk. It sits in its docking station until needed. Being wireless means that it can operate equipment form anywhere in the home (or even the garden). The tablet runs the Firefox web browser in kiosk mode (via a Firefox extension). Looking at the screen, you wouldn’t know that it was in fact a web page generated by Chipmunk’s web server plug-in. Along the left hand side of the screen are navigation buttons - one button for each A/V component. When clicked, the relevant screen is loaded. Each button sends a discrete event to the controller via the web server plug-in. Each event in turn triggers a command to operate the relevant A/V component.

A Lua scripting engine has been built into Chipmunk which, among other things, enables dynamic web pages to be generated. The web server plug-in supports Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a technique which enables two-way communication between a web browser and web server without the web page having to reload. For Chipmunk this enables real-time status information to be streamed to the web browser and displayed without screen flicker. Gary uses this facility to good effect, with the volume level and current play state being displayed at all times. For example, if Gary were to manually change the volume on his McIntosh by turning the dial on the front of the receiver, the web page would change automatically to show the new volume level. With a little web page design and judicious use of style sheets Gary has created a professional looking control interface that is easy to use and pleasing to the eye.

I found the combination of Chipmunk and the GC-100 to be perfect for my complex application. Chipmunk allowed me to develop sophisticated logic and web pages with ease, while the GC-100 allowed me to distribute devices anywhere on my network, independent of where Chipmunk resides. In the future, I will be able to add controls for new rooms by simply adding new GC-100 units.

Gary Barnett

On one of the screens there’s even a DVD listing, giving details of the 400 DVDs loaded into the Sony CX777ES changer. You can page through the listing, view DVD details and cover art, and finally select and play a movie. And if that’s not enough we were blown away by Gary’s solution to creating the DVD listing. He uses CollectorZ’s Movie Collector software to automatically fetch movie information from the web and insert it into his DVD database by reading the bar code from the DVD packaging. Gary has attached a barcode reader to his HTPC via one of its USB ports. One simple scan, and all the details get imported and immediately appear on the screen. All that remains is for Gary to pop the disc into the Sony changer. Now that’s automation!

Spurred on by his success Gary is in the process of putting two other systems together that will run off the same instance of Chipmunk, with additional GC-100 units. They will be controlling the system in his home office, and the master bedroom. He plans to use the Samsung Q1 touch-screen running Windows XP tablet and Firefox, but with a smaller screen size.

Will adding additional A/V components to the set-up mean a lot of additional work updating the web pages? Not for Gary. His control screen layouts are defined using the open standard JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). He can therefore add new pages and devices in minutes simply by adding new JSON definitions. The only additional work will be in learning the IR codes for the new devices. We were so impressed with what Gary had achieved using JSON that we have implemented full JSON support in the next release of Chipmunk.

You can get Chipmunk AV Controller up and running and controlling your equipment very quickly. There are enough out-of-the-box hooks to cover basic needs; and for the power user, there is the additional flexibility of a powerful scripting engine and plug-in API for tailoring the system to your exact needs. As with any software offering this degree of flexibility, there can be an initial learning curve - especially for the more advanced scripting features, but the results can be stunning. The combination of Global Caché’s GC-100 and Chipmunk AV Controller makes for a cost-effective and elegant solution to Home Cinema control.

Case Study: Connect and Control with the GC-100 and Chipmunk AV Controller

Introduction

Connect & Control

Connect & Control in Action