Meet Rick Grayston:

Winner of the ACE CEDIA Booth Tour Drawing for an MVP-5200i

We would like to thank everyone that participated in the ACE CEDIA Booth Tour and turned in a voucher to obtain CEUs toward the 2008 ACE Maintenance Plan.  A drawing was held after the show to select the winner of a MVP-5200i: 5.2" Modero® ViewPoint® Touch Panel with Intercom.

Meet Rick Grayston, the lucky winner!  Rick has been in the A/V industry with Mission Audio Video, Inc. of Santa Barbara, California for 19 years.  We interviewed Rick and here is what he had to say:

Tell us about your field experience and notable projects you have worked on recently.  Also, tell us about your technical experience throughout your career.

I started in the A/V business in 1989.  We had a retail showroom that sold high end home and car audio.  We did home and car installations as well.  I worked in both areas but my focus was custom home A/V.  Back then we had to be a lot more creative as far as coming up with solutions to what are now common control issues.  Going back to service or upgrade some of the installations I did 15 years ago are a blast from the past, so many custom black boxes and relays.  Today’s solutions are far more elegant.   I started with AMX Landmark almost 10 years ago and have made the transition to NetLinx.  Today I help with our AMX projects by managing the installation and helping with the programming and touch panel designs.  We have installed many AMX projects from one-room Home Theater control to full Home Control including Alarm, HVAC, Blinds, Lighting and A/V. We recently finished a project with 30 audio zones in which we updated an existing AMX Access system and TP3 panels to a NetLinx system and Modero Touch Panels.  A big challenge we faced was getting good Zigbee wireless coverage for the outdoor speaker locations around the very large property which was being control by an AMX R4 remote. Due to the lack of being able to hardwire Zigbee repeaters we had to experiment and get creative in finding locations where the wireless repeaters would work.  The client was very pleased with the upgrade and now we are adding more AMX R4’s in a couple of the kid's rooms.

Tell us about the project where your AMX University Training provided the most help.

I have gone through several AMX classes including NetLinx Installer, NetLinx Programmer I, and TPD4 Touchpanel Design.  Recently I have been tasked with creating the touch panel designs for the last few projects.  The TPD4 class has been instrumental in helping me with these projects.  These projects all included MVP-5200’s.  Being a new panel from AMX, I had to do a lot of work and experimentation to figure out what would or wouldn’t work as far as button and text sizes.  These installations also included music servers with 2-way feedback and existing templates had to be adjusted to easily be operated by the customer.  I reworked these templates and going through TPD4 Design class certainly helped. 

Do you have any advice for folks out there who are new to AMX?

Training, Training, and more Training!  AMX provides excellent training, free of charge.  Take advantage of it!  Try to put your training to use soon after you've gone through class.  The toughest thing with AMX is the programming.  Finding a good programmer is key.  I have found the best way to learn about any new product is to take it home and set it up in your own system and learn how it programs and operates.  How can you sell or install it confidently if you yourself haven’t had a chance to play with it?  Putting AMX in your own home allows you to put your training into practice.  Good Luck!

How do you plan to use your new MVP-5200i? 

I plan on replacing my existing 2-way Viewpoint (G3) in my Living Room with the new MVP-5200i.  It will control my A/V system, including a Request Media Server, a single zone of HVAC, and control of an Insteon Lighting system.  I will also use the MVP-5200 to test new customer touch panel designs.

Congratulations, Rick!