Lighting Controller for Employer

We recently moved into a new building at work. It is very large at 50,000 sqft per floor and we will be occupying 2 floors.
In this building, there is a very rudimentary lighting control system. It consists of a timer (24h), several ice cube relays, timer modules and various push buttons around the floor that control different zones.
The way that it currently works is as follows:

• When the main timer is in ON mode, all the lights are on, on the entire floor (500 -4 lamp T8 fluorescent fixtures)
• When the main power timer is in OFF mode, all the lights except for emergency lighting are off.

• Now, if you enter the building and want to have light in a particular area, you press a button corresponding to the zone you want light in. This will turn the light on and start a timer (currently set at an hour) and then turn off after that time elapses.
  
• If another zone is turned on, say 30 minutes later, they will all turn of at the end of the hour of the first button push.
  

The problem with this is thus, we have many different group (teams) that work on the floor. For instance, no one but a group of 30 people are in the building on Saturday and Sunday from 8 to 5. So, i would like to have everything but the area where they are off.

Automatic Irrigation Valve opener

This is a project that has been on my mind for over 5 years now. (maybe even more than that). It has started out of 'necessity'. In our part of the world, we use flood irrigation for not only our agricultural crops but a good portion of my city also flood irrigate their yards. Watering times are pretty consistent but during the summer it is pretty much every other week. The time of day that we get to take our share of the water, however is very inconsistent. On one occasion it may be at 10:30 am (while i am at work), or on another occasion it will come at 1 am in the morning (while i am sleeping). I have worked up several different prototypes and feel that from a mechanical standpoint, i am where i need to be. The software/ hardware are still a work in progress. The project at this point has evolved, so i will just describe the project as it is now. We will discuss future evolution later in this blog.
There is to be a controller, similar to that of a standard irrigation controller, that will be located in the house. It will have some type of LCD display. The display will show the current time, the time and date that the irrigation valve is to open, the status of the valve (open or closed), the water level in the yard (more on this later) and maybe some visual color to know at a glance the status.
The other end will be the controller on the mechanical hardware itself. This controller will run an h-bridge to drive the motor, it will do reckoning to determine the state on the valve (closed, opening, open, closing) as well as monitor the water level in the yard.
Both units will communicate via a wireless XBEE radio connection. The range is somewhere around a mile.
More later. I will post pictures.