The model house at Splendid Aparna‘s Palm Meadows is open yesterday (Sunday, the 16th.) and we are invited to a Brunch/High Tea event. My father-in-law couldn’t join, but the rest of the family went there by 1.00pm. The arrangements made by the group are awesome. Right from valet parking to hospitality to transportation to model house, every little detail is taken care of.
The model house looked great. The interiors as shown there would cost about 50-70 Lakhs (about 130K-180K USD) and they looked great on this floor plan. Centralized Split A/C, Solar Panels and Home automation package impressed me a lot.
We had a lunch followed by another visit to a model villa with limited features. Even that one is impressive enough.
Met with Sitaramaraju and family there, who are visiting from LA. He is my schoolmate.
I had an opportunity to have a brief chat with Venkat, the President & CEO of the company behind the home automation project. The features like their ability to provision a network connection (based on user’s choice of the carrier) from a central control station is worth exploring. They also piggyback the TataSky and Cable signals on the same fiber optic line. They are promising a capacity of upto 10Mbps, depending on the plans chosen by the customer. They run a WLAN within the villa from a central control point in the house. (I am happy to see their Netgear wireless routers, the same type as I use at home right now.) The box has the VOIP ports also. The home automation project controls the Air Conditioning, lighting and other electrical gadgets too. (Some of these ideas are similar to the hacks we did back in late 1990s in our Bay Area apartment, using X10‘s gadgets.) The controls can be accessed, when you are away, through a web based interface. All this is done without exposing a single wire within the Villa’s premises. Very impressive work done by this San Jose based startup company. Good to see that their solutions are put in to use at a place across the globe.
Here are the pics from the visit. Due to busy crowd, didn’t take many pictures.
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