Network, CCTV, video and automation

This is lesson four, the last in this series, and it covers the four disciplines that share the plan with the audio design: Wi-Fi, cameras, video distribution and control. Because the rooms are shared, you don't draw anything again. You switch discipline and keep going. I've switched to Network.

The café already has one access point in the sample. The Inspector shows the network results for the selected area: the coverage, the average signal in dBm, the band, and the RSSI scale that the heatmap uses. The toolbar button for this discipline is Network tools, which we'll open in a moment.

The Library has access points, and a separate list of switches and routers. Details shows the radios, the bands and the power draw of each model before you place it. Auto-place APs puts access points into the areas for you, based on the room size and the materials, and Import CSV brings in your own catalogue, the same way it does for speakers.

The Layers menu in this discipline is short. The Wi-Fi coverage heatmap is the main one, with labels and dimensions, and the colourblind-safe palette.

With the heatmap on, the plan colours each room by predicted signal strength. Green is strong, orange is usable, red is weak. The scale at the bottom runs from minus eighty-five to minus forty dBm. The walls matter here as much as they do for sound. A glass partition barely touches a signal; a concrete wall takes a large bite out of it.

If you set the wall materials in lesson one, the Wi-Fi design already knows about them. Toggle the heatmap off and on to relate the coloured regions to the walls, and treat the result as a planning estimate. Validate it on site with a survey tool, because furniture and people change it.

Network tools holds the choices that change the calculation: the band, two point four or five gigahertz, the wall materials and the libraries. Five gigahertz is faster and shorter range. Two point four reaches further through walls. Most installs plan for five and let two point four fill the gaps.

Results for the network gives you the coverage percentage, the average signal, and the strongest and weakest readings in the area, the access points placed here, and a bill of materials for this discipline. If a corner is red, move the access point towards it, or add one, and watch the numbers change.

Equipment is where the wired side comes together, and it's shared across disciplines. The access points, the cameras and the control panels all need switch ports and Power over Ethernet, so the switch in the rack is sized from all of them together. The buttons at the bottom go to the rack designer and the wiring diagram, where these devices already appear. Check the port count and the PoE budget here before you choose a switch.

Now CCTV. The sample has a dome camera in the café, and the plan draws its field of view as a wedge. The toolbar button is Cameras, with the FOV and DORI coverage options. The Inspector has the recorder and storage settings for the system: the retention in days, continuous or motion recording, the codec, the frame rate, and the scene activity. From those it works out the storage you need.

Then the selected camera's properties: the mount, the height, and the tilt. The bars at the bottom are the DORI grades: detect, observe, recognise and identify, as the percentage of the area where each one is met. Those come from the resolution and the lens, and they're the honest measure of a camera design. A corner can be inside the field of view and still not have enough pixels to recognise a face.

Cameras, in the toolbar, has the camera library, the recorder library, the auto-place option, and the two coverage layers: the field of view with the DORI zones, and the pixel density map. Auto-place puts cameras at the entrances and corners of each area, and the lens calculator tells you which focal length gives you the detail you need at a given distance.

This is the pixel density map. It colours the floor by pixels per metre, which is the number that decides whether you can identify someone. The legend runs from observe to identify. Check it at the doors, the till and anywhere a client will ask for evidence. Where it's amber, you need a longer lens, a higher resolution camera, or a camera closer to the spot.

The equipment list for CCTV is the cameras, the recorder and the network it hangs on. Check the recording channels against the camera count, the storage against the retention you set, and the PoE capacity against the cameras, because a recorder with eight channels and a switch with four powered ports is a common mistake, and the tool will show it.

Video is next: distribution of sources to displays, either through a matrix or over the network with AV over IP. The toolbar button is Video, and the Inspector points you to Library and then Distribution design, because this discipline is designed in a dialog rather than on the plan.

This is the distribution designer. Sources on the left: an Apple TV, satellite, a Blu-ray player, a media server, each with a quantity and a location, in the rack or in a room. Below them you choose the connections each source has, HDMI, optical, and so on. On the right, the displays: one row per area with the number of screens, the resolution, and the cable distance to the head end, which the tool measures from the plan. The residential and commercial presets fill in a typical set so you're not starting from nothing.

Auto-design distribution reads those sources and displays and proposes the system: a matrix with enough inputs and outputs, or AV over IP encoders and decoders on the network, with the parts and the room assignments. Review lists what it chose and why. The design checks HDCP compliance along each path and EDID management, so a four K source doesn't get sent to a display that can't show it. Close the designer and the equipment is already in Zones, in the rack and on the wiring, like everything else.

And Automation, which is the ELAN control system. The toolbar button is Automation, and again the design happens in a dialog, from Library and then System design. The plan is still useful here, because the touch panels and the door stations are placed in rooms.

The control designer starts with room devices. For every area you enter the touch screens by size, the door station and the cameras, and Prefill typical puts one eight inch panel in each room as a starting point. The System step chooses what the controller has to drive: the audio zones from lesson three, Netvio video, lighting, climate and security, and Review shows the result.

Auto-design control system picks the ELAN processor and the interfaces: the EL-SC-150 in the sample, with its IP, serial, IR and relay ports counted against what the connections need. The review shows the port load on each type, so you know whether you need the next controller up, or an IO expander. Close it, and the controller is in the rack and the control links are on the wiring diagram. Remember that a design schedule records the intended hardware and connections. Programming and on-site verification are still part of the installation.

Which brings us back to Wiring, with every discipline on one drawing. Speakers, amplifiers, access points, cameras, the video encoders and the ELAN controller all appear, each with its real ports, and the cable schedule lists every link with a type and an ID. The cable colours tell them apart. Export sends it to CAD as a DXF, and the same drawing goes into the report.

That's the end of the series. Four lessons: the workspace and plans, the audio design, the system and the documents, and the other disciplines. Everything you've seen is in the Learning Centre under the Help button, with the guides you can search while you work. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you on the next project.