Author: GMI Automation

Halloween is here! While many luxury homes are set back behind gates and away from trick or treating youngsters, Crestron automation systems often find themselves in luxury gated communities and large developed neighborhoods where tonight the sidewalks and streets may be filled with children and families enjoying the popular holiday. Luckily for these folks, outdoor lighting is one of the many home systems that can be automated through a Crestron control system. Today we will be discussing how this automation helps ensure the safety of not just young candy seekers on Halloween, but also yourself and your family throughout the entire rest of the year.

Outdoor lighting comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but generally falls into three main categories. Entryway lighting for front, back, and garage doors, guide lighting for pathways, driveways, and walkways, and of course accent lighting for windows and home features. All of these types of outdoor lighting can be linked together and controlled through luxury Crestron automation. Imagine opening your front gate a path of light illuminating up your driveway directly to the front door of your home. For those homes without gates that might get a trick or treater or two, scenes can be manually adjusted to ensure the walkway and front landing of your home are safely lit, providing parents with a sense of safety and relief.

Much like the lighting inside a home, outdoor lighting can be tied directly to the year round security of your home itself. It has been shown by many studies that automated lighting  can help discourage potential intruders, and this goes double for outdoor lighting. When you are not at home for an extended period of time, perhaps visiting relatives for the holiday or at a winter home, your lighting schedules can make your home appear lived in and busily occupied. For example, if while commuting regularly you arrive home at the same time everyday, your front porch lights illuminating as you touch a button on your phone, you can set the front porch light to activate at the same time each day you are away, creating the appearance of occupancy for any would be burglars.

Outdoor lighting and safety measures can be useful in commercial spaces as well, especially with Daylight Savings Time beginning this weekend. Soon the end of the work day will align with the setting sun and can create dangerous situations in parking lots or entranceways that are not properly lit. When tied into an access control system, Crestron automation can ensure that the lights in and around your office building are active down to the last person coming or going. In the event of an unauthorized attempt to access, lights and sirens can be triggered instantly giving a potential intruder little place to escape.

So as the year ends and the daylight hours wane, safety in and around homes and businesses becomes more paramount than ever. Luckily, Crestron automation is here to protect residents, guests, or employees at your luxury home or office.

Learn more about how Crestron can automate lighting for your luxury space.

A Crestron automation system in a home or office is the epitome of luxury. Wired and seamlessly connected to every aspect of your home, these systems, when properly built and coded by an integrator such as the #DoneRightNotEasy crew, simplify and streamline not only your home, but your life as well. To us, it is more than just this simplicity that brings true value to our Crestron automation systems, our value comes from taking our automation to the next level by going deeper into traditional automation concepts to truly revolutionize a space.

Today we will be looking at three ways we take traditional Crestron automation to the next level through proper coding, programming, and installation.

Shading and Lighting – The aesthetics and beauty of your luxury home are important to you, and one of the main ways a Crestron automation system adds to this is through automated lighting and shades. These systems are integrated together and programmed to provide your desired level of light at all times throughout the day and night, either through programmed buttons, or through timed automation.

To take these systems to the next level we provide an in house interior design solution. This ensures that not only are the lighting fixtures and window treatment choices powerfully automated, but that they complement and enhance the aesthetics of your home as well. In addition to this, those luxury homeowners who have invested in fine art pieces will find our automated lighting for these pieces helps protect the longevity of these investments through proper automation or light type and levels.

Distributed Entertainment – The ability to have audio and video entertainment instantly streamed to devices throughout your home is one of the biggest selling features of Crestron automation. With the evolution of both HD video and quality streaming music, to do this effectively requires a detailed and deft understanding of both how a system is physically built, and how it is programmed on the back end.

Distributed 4K video can be one of the most difficult tasks to conquer for an integrator, and there isn’t always one right way to accomplish this. GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy have a variety of weapons at our disposal, including extensive knowledge of how to navigate ever changing HDCP protocols, and how to equip our systems to deliver the same 4K quality to every screen in the home through centralized source equipment and scaling devices.

Security – Home security and protection may seem boring, but in reality is one of the most important bedrocks to an automation system. Either by protecting your home directly through 24/7 monitoring, or by more tacit methods such as automated lighting scenes designed to make an empty home seem occupied, the protection of your home is both constant and out of sight.

Integrated security not only protects your home, but it combines directly into automation programming to allow for a new world of possibilities. Room occupancy sensors, door contacts, and access control, work directly with your Crestron system to trigger lighting, and entertainment choices simply by entering or leaving a room or opening a specific door. Even in the event of an attempted break-in, the entire home is programmed to react to deter any potential intruders.

Are you interested in taking your luxury home to the next level with Crestron automation?

Any integrator will tell you that the opportunity to work on a new build home, either the entirety of the building or an extension, is one of the best opportunities to build a truly one of a kind system. This type of opportunity only comes to those integration professionals who have a deep understanding of how homes are built and designed in the first place. We’ve discussed many of the ways Crestron automation touches every part of a home, and why GMI automation and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew take a holistic view of every job site. This attitude is especially important when working alongside the ones responsible for new build construction and home expansion: architects and builders.

Relationships with architects and builders is important for any type of vendor working on a home, as these are the professionals that by their nature have the greatest understanding of the entire site. Automation and integration professionals specifically benefit from cultivating these relationships due to the importance of pre-wiring. The ability to have early access to building specifications allows us to be more efficient in our design, knowing exactly how much and what type of wire we need to appropriately automate a home and distribute audio and video. Working closely with these vendors also allows us to identify structural issues which may stand in the way of the homeowners desired automation experience, and correct them on paper early, saving ourselves, the builders, and most importantly, our clients time, money, and frustration.

When working with a builder on an existing structure that is being renovated, oftentimes the placement of a control room or even a new theater can cause unexpected issues. Take for example the luxury theater we installed in a client’s Bedminster New Jersey home. When building the specialized and acoustically treated room, we came upon an important support beam when it came time to remove a wall. In this case we were able to leverage our relationship with the builder on the project to procure appropriate materials and working alongside the builder to complete the space as designed. All of this while staying on schedule and ensuring that our client got the theater they expected.

Working closely with architects and builders doesn’t just increase the value of our own automation services, it enhances the value of their services as well. Often in first time Crestron installations we often find ourselves working with vendors who don’t have experience with automation systems. When this happens we take the time to educate and ask second level questions about their work and process so we can ensure everything will play nice in the end, leading to positive performance and improvement all around. Builders and architects are especially interested in growing their knowledge base when it comes to automation, as nearly 75 percent of Americans surveyed say they are looking for automation technology in their next home. The knowledge attained by working with an experienced team like the #DoneRightNotEasy crew can easily lead to more jobs and higher margins for an architect or builder who is looking to the future.

Whether you are a builder or architect experiencing automation for the first time, or have worked with professional integrators many times, the value gained by joining forces on a job site with GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew is invaluable. Our experience with Crestron automation system is unmatched in the industry and our ability to look at the bigger picture of any job site makes this a match made in heaven.

Are you a luxury home architect or builder looking to incorporate automation into your next project? 

In the world of luxury homes, perhaps nothing has evolved more over the past few decades as the media or listening room. While speaker, amplification, and other audio technology has certainly seen its share of improvements, the most significant changes have come in the media technology itself. The first digital music players began popping up in the late 1990s, and pretty soon digital music was as ubiquitous as vinyl records were at the dawn of the rock and roll era. With this rapid change in the way we obtain and listen to music, the listening room of the past has taken on an entirely new direction, and with through distributed audio and Crestron automation, homes have been transformed like never before.

While the ubiquity of streaming music is hard to deny, effectively distributing streaming audio throughout a space is a much more complicated endeavor. With so many streaming options available to consumers these days, each streaming at different bandwidths, it’s important to optimize these streams for consistency of quality. This means utilizing our go to streaming device, the powerful MMS-5 streaming server by Autonomic Control, which allows our music loving clients to stream from pandora, spotify, and any other streaming music service they desire with optimal sound quality throughout their home.

Streaming music from an online source such as those listed above is only one piece of the puzzle. Music purchased in either a physical form or purchased files need to be stored on a physical hard drive and distributed effectively throughout a Crestron control system. Luckily, the aforementioned MMS 5 can be powerfully integrated with Google Drive. This integration allows us to link music stored in a hard drive at one location into a custom built cloud streaming platform giving access to a music library in any part of the home or even an off site location without having to duplicate and store large music files in more than one location. This means that when an end user purchases and downloads a new record or song, it is instantly available from all of their Crestron enabled devices.

To us and to our clients alike, one of the most important features of a Crestron automation system is the ability to simplify and streamline as much of their lives as possible. With what seems like endless choices for streaming music we at the #DoneRightNotEasy crew take steps to ensure that selecting what music to listen to is as second nature as grabbing a CD or Vinyl record off of a shelf. To do this we work closely with our customers to understand their music listening habits, and design user interfaces and automated systems to deliver exactly the music they need when they need it.

Are you a music lover looking to stream audio throughout your home the right way? Contact GMI today to learn more.

For those luxury homeowners that just can’t get enough of the summer lifestyle, an indoor pool is a natural choice. However as with any complicated system, indoor pools bring with them a share of headaches that our busy clients do not have the time or energy to add to their already very full plates. Luckily for them, GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew make it our mission to streamline and simplify the life of our clients, and integration of an indoor pool into a Crestron automation system can create an amazing indoor swimming destination as stress free as the rest of a luxury automated home.

When your pool is inside a home, as opposed to out in the elements, it calls for a more nuanced approach to regulating the temperature of the water. This is especially important if your indoor pool has both a traditional pool as well as a hot tub or spa. When automated through a Crestron control system, indoor pool and hot tub temperatures can be directly linked to the overall environmental systems of the home. Integrating the pool and hot tub into the larger full home ecosystem saves energy and time, and creates the perfect swimming temperature each and every time the pool is used.

Indoor pools are often used as part of an at home workout, either directly through lap swimming, or by using the hot tub as part of a warmup or cool down procedure. As with the home gym, integration into a Crestron automation system means that hot tub jets and heating systems can be programmed to turn on at the exact right time based off when you start or end your workout. All of this happens seamlessly in the background, and can be triggered by the touch of a button on any Crestron panel or switch. Imagine completing your home work out and walking directly into a hot tub set to the ideal temperature and jet setting, all without you lifting a finger.

Maintaining the chemical balance of an indoor pool can be tricky, especially if it is located in a room with large windows. Much like an outdoor pool, the sun’s rays can significantly affect pool chemistry. With shading solutions programmed correctly by the #DoneRightNotEasy crew, you can ensure that your indoor pool is shaded properly throughout the day, greatly reducing pool chemical issues. The Crestron control system can even be programmed to trigger a chemical feed into the pool when chemicals are out of balance.

An indoor pool room can dazzle and amaze when equipped with in pool and around pool lights controlled by Crestron automation. As the standout feature of many luxury homes, automating these lighting systems or indoor water features goes a long way to adding the “wow” factor that many Crestron automation customers are looking for.

Interested in automating your home and indoor pool?

When we are first approached for a full home automation project, either new build or takeover, we often encounter clients who are unaware of the true potential of a Crestron system. While the more well known components of a Crestron automation system might be what originally piques the interest of a prospective client, the reality is that Crestron control is only limited by your imagination, and that with proper design, installation and coding, anything is possible.

As experienced integrators and Crestron engineers, we’ve made many of our client’s dreams into reality. Here are just some of the ways we use this expertise to bring a unique Crestron experience to our clients.

Exceeding Expectations

One of the ways we separate ourselves from other integrators and provide a unique experience is by providing solutions that are better than our clients even anticipate. Specifically with distributed 4K. We’ve talked at length about the difficulties of effectively distributing 4K throughout a space, and it is because of that difficulty that we take it to the next level.
TVs are mounted throughout the home and connected back to the Crestron control system and centralized video sources. These sources are all different, and thus send out signals at different resolutions. We install scalers at the TV level so that no matter what a source is presenting, even if it is not in 4K resolution, it will present as such. Our clients are spending big money for 4K projectors and televisions, and many integrators will fail to take advantage of that.

Bringing People Together

GMI and the #DoneRightNotEasy crew believe that automation’s purpose should be to simplify and streamline not just your home or office, but your life as well. Many of our clients spend time across multiple homes and places of business, and need a simple but effective way to keep in communication with family members or business associates.

We accomplish this is by linking systems together with powerful and reliable network connections, creating the infrastructure for instant communication. In a recent multi home system we included a custom built, robust intercom system which allowed the end users to use any control panel to speak with someone at any other control panel, no matter in which house they happen to be. In this blog we have also extensively outlined our expertise in video conferencing systems. Both intercom and video conferencing systems require interplay between Crestron automation platforms and third party software, which require unique and customized code to work effectively.

Integrating Protection and Control

Crestron automation is known for being exciting, cool, and on the cutting edge of technology. Quite the opposite, home and network security are two of the most boring things imaginable. However, when they are all linked together, automation, home security, and protected networks, they bring a level of control and simplicity that our clients simply do not expect.

Not only does this integration protect your home from unwanted intrusion from physical burglars and cyber criminals, it also provides the foundation on which your simplified life now rests. Room occupancy sensors and door contacts, traditionally used in security systems, are dual purposed to trigger any number of automation scenes. Imagine leaving a room and not having to think twice about even hitting a switch to ensure lights, music and entertainment devices are powered down. Network systems are built from the ground up to ensure that your devices are never without powerful wireless signal, no matter where you are on the site.

The happiness and experience of our client’s is the most important thing for us, and it’s because of this that we strive everyday to provide unique and powerful automation solutions for their homes and businesses.

Interested in a Crestron automation system that will blow you out of the water?