First want to thank Nate. When my existing hard wired system died a few years ago I said there must be something better then this old school analog crap. First thing that came to mind was replace the guts of the old system with something modern that could talk to the perfectly good hard wires I had. Couldn't find anything for a couple of years until I found what Nate invented.
First problem I had was after I dismantled my old system I had a rats nest of wires dangling from the ceiling. The bundle was big and nothing was labeled. As I was toning things out I realized cable management was going to be a necessity. To solve this problem I bought some cheap ($10) screw terminals from Amazon. My plan was to terminate all of the existing wires so that I could just use jumper wires to get to the Konnected boards.
Second problem was I couldn't find a project box big enough to do what I wanted. So I just threw up a piece of plywood on the wall. This worked out great as I was able to mount everything into the wood with screws and didn't have to worry about shorting anything.
Next after I mounted the Konnected boards I make the "cross connects" with some CAT 5E cable I had left over. I just removed the outer jacket and pulled the pairs apart. Perfect size wire. If I used regular wire like the original wires it would have been too cramped.
Last thing to figure out was power distribution. The splitters that came with the kit were a bit short and cumbersome for my layout. Again after another $20 from Amazon I was able to put together the custom power distro you see in the picture.
That's it! My fingers hurt!
Domenic