The May 2 DACS General Meeting will feature a presentation on “Whole House Integration”. Our presenter for the evening will be David Freda, Vice President, Audio Visual Systems.

What is whole house integration? One of the hottest topics of the day. Did you ever wonder how to automate a house using 21 st Century technology? Everything from Audio Visual equipment to lighting and heating and cooling.

David’s session will cover the items below along with plenty of time for questions.

• What is home integration?
• What do we integrate and why?
• How it works.
• User interfaces - the stuff people play with.
• Various control systems - the brains behind it all.
• The Subsystems to be controlled.
• Programmers - the key ingredient.
• Graphical design
• Design details and documentation
• Implementation and installation

David has been working with Audio Video Systems for close to twenty years in the custom electronics industry. He is a self taught technical geek with a passion for intricate control systems and is completely jaded about the size or items included in installations. He has worked in some of the biggest homes in the area and for some of the wealthiest people in the world. His firm has done installations around the world including the Caribbean, Asia, and Western and Eastern Europe.

As the name of the firm implies the company deals with AV systems. But as the industry has matured over the years they are doing more elaborate home integration systems. His role at the firm has drastically changed over the years from a stock boy, when first hired at the company, to Vice President in charge of Westchester and Connecticut technical design and sales. On a daily basis his role is to develop technical solutions for high end residential installations. This involves the use of computer based programs created specifically to design, develop and program the various control subsystems. The various programs used daily range from Office applications to AutoCAD. The average sized house the firm works on is 12,000 sq. ft. which means there are a lot of computer controlled systems that require attention, from lights, to heat and cooling systems, in addition to the AV systems.

DACS meetings are held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. Activities begin at 7 p.m. with casual networking, a general question and answer period (Ask DACS) and a discussion of what’s new in technology followed by a short break and the evening presentation at 8:00.

As a reminder, our General Meetings are free and open to the public so invite anyone you know who would be interested in this topic