A consultant, not a contractor
Nineteen years of answering these questions in public, and a house I built to prove it.
Nineteen years in the DIY automation community, answering integration questions for free from my professional experience. You're welcome to read through it.
That is the same approach paying clients get, with more of my time and access to dealer only equipment behind it.
I am an authorized dealer for Lutron, RTI, and ELK, and a preferred partner with Alarm Relay. That access exists because the good equipment is sold through dealers rather than stores. It is the entry point to this work, not the point of it.
RTI runs everything in my own house, with Lutron RA3 lighting and shades and an ELK M1 for security, all of it designed, wired, and programmed by me. Rather than ask you to trust testimonials, I would rather you look at the work and judge it directly.
A good deal of my work has been for other installers rather than for homeowners. On the RTI side I write drivers, the plugins that let a processor talk to equipment it does not support out of the box, and other dealers use them in their own projects. Custom installers in the same trade have also hired me to program the RTI remotes and touchpanels on systems they had already sold, where the programming went past what their own team wanted to take on.
The RTI forum is dealer only, so unlike the Universal Devices work none of it is publicly readable. The drivers are the record instead.
Everything I build gets documented and handed over: programming files, wiring diagrams, equipment records. Nothing about your house should depend on me being reachable in five years, and nothing I build does.
I work nationwide. Design, specification, and programming all happen remotely, so location makes no difference to the job.
Drivers other installers use
Each one connects a piece of equipment RTI does not support natively, so it can be controlled from the same remote and touchpanel as everything else. My NFL Sunday Ticket driver shipped alongside a partnership with Blackman Signature Designs. On one of their projects they designed the client's floorplan interface and I integrated it into the RTI system on the iPad. RTI ran the Sunday Ticket driver on a touchpanel at their own booth at the CEDIA Expo, the annual trade show where the control system manufacturers show what their platforms can do.
