Applications and Widgets are Homeward Bound

As we start the next decade of custom residential electronic integration it’s clear that we have to know as much about software as the hardware that we sell. While it has always been important for us to know the detailed hardware specifications of flat screen TVs, whole house audio systems or home control systems – it’s now equally critical that we know how these products are being enhanced by new software applications commonly known as apps and widgets.

With Apple once again in the creative and influential lead in our industry (remember how the iPOD affected our whole house audio solutions), the app store that they introduced to enhance their phone is now being emulated by companies like Control4 to enhance their home control offerings. Control4 calls it their 4Store. Starting sometime early this year, you will be able to add Control4 apps that will allow you to do things like check your Google calendar, make a dinner reservation, or even get first aid information from any in-wall, tabletop, or Control4 TV screen around the home. Think of how useful it would be to see your Google calendar on any Control4 7” touchscreen – now there is an app for that!

Residential hardware, software, and service companies are recognizing that Control4 now has the market share and the screen real estate to leverage the use of their product or service in thousands of US homes - and in almost any room of those homes. While iPhone applications tend to be oriented towards mobile services, Control4s in-home applications tend to be oriented to in-home services, such as monitoring your home’s electrical usage or opening your front door. Initially Control4 will only have a few dozen applications but one would expect that to grow very quickly as third party developers realize the value they can add to their residential products by adding a Control4 application to their product that can communicate over a standard ZigBee Pro wireless protocol. “The introduction of the 4Store could have the same kind of impact on the smart home that the iTunes App Store has had on the smartphone,” says Will West, CEO of Control4. “It provides a unique way for homeowners to personalize their control system so they get more enjoyment from their homes and more efficient use of all their devices and systems.”

Widgets act much like applications in that they are small software programs geared to providing a unique software service to a hardware platform. Widgets are springing up like weeds on almost every new TV set these days - offering up services like weather, stock, downloadable movies, social sites, sports, auction sites – you name it. If it’s a service that a large number of viewers would like to watch on demand from their internet connected TV then expect that you’ll find a widget to support it. One of the more interesting widget applications that was shown at CES this year was in the Panasonic booth with their Skype video conferencing application. The Panasonic Skype enabled TV (with a small camera and microphone located at the top of the TV) would recognize when a Skype call came in with a small icon popping up on the lower right portion of the TV screen. With your TV remote you click on Skype call-in icon and instantly the caller’s image shows up on the screen and you are in a video call on your big screen TV – even the whole family can join in. With Skype having over 500 million users worldwide I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature becomes a standard software addition to all TVs within the next 5 years.

Other widgets that have exploded in popularity recently include the Netflix widget to allow customers to instantly download movies. This widget can now be found on almost all high-end TVs and Blu-ray players and (you could probably see this coming) as an application on Control4 touchscreens. Pandora is another widget that has gained tremendous popularity on a number of audio receivers, TVs, and digital photo screens. It seems like almost anything with a wired or wireless internet connection and speakers is now a candidate for Pandora’s music streaming services.

As custom electronics integrators it’s imperative that we are knowledgeable about the new apps and widgets that are permeating the intelligent, connected homes that we design and install. Just think of how iPhone customers brag about the amazing things they do with their phones based on apps they add to their phone. Our clients will now be able to enjoy the same great experience in their homes when they add apps and widgets that enhance the value of the integrated platforms that we install. Now isn’t that a nice change – instead of our technological solutions becoming obsolete over time they will actually improve with a healthy daily dose of our recommended home apps and widgets!

(Reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Top 5 Predictions for 2010

Another year has flown by – and in the residential custom electronics market time seems to fly by at gigahertz speeds! If you don’t attend at least one of the major electronics trade shows each year you feel like you are quickly out of touch with new residential technology solutions. So to help prepare you for next year’s technology developments I’ve prepared my top 5 predictions list for 2010. Keep in mind these are only my predictions based on the trends that I have seen in this market over the past decade – so measure each one against your own experiences to decide how you want them to guide your own technology purchase decisions. Without further ado, here goes:

Prediction #1:
Apple will continue to extend its technical prowess throughout the home. Riding on the enormous success of its iPOD music player and the iPhone – expect to see Apple’s genius for user-friendly interfaces to spread into touch screen tablets, flat screen televisions and whole house music systems. As Apple moves from mobile and single room solutions to whole house distributed entertainment solutions they will increasingly serve the mass market with these products. The net effect will be that even a greater percentage of the US residential market will become aware of whole house digital entertainment solutions and many will be seeking custom electronic integrators help to deliver on the promise of these offerings.

Prediction #2:
More affordable, high performance, in-wall touch-screen controls will become readily available. Over the past decade or so, these touch-screens have been primarily used in high end, high budget whole house control offerings. Control 4 changed that market a couple of years ago with their introduction of their sub $700 in-wall touch-screen control interfaces and I expect that this sub $1,000 touch-screen control trend to continue with higher resolution and larger screens from a number of major electronics manufacturers over the next 12 months. With increased processing power and higher resolutions these touch-screens will have very rich end-user interfaces that are much more affordable for our clients in the months and years ahead.

Prediction #3:
Home servers will be an integral part of most of our total home integration offerings. HP has just started shipping their home server line of computers and it is inevitable that the home will have a server. Inevitable because our clients are asking us for more services than just email, print and Internet access. They want a photo server so they can view photos everywhere in the home, they want a music server so they can listen to their recorded music everywhere in the home, and they want a storage server so their data will be backed up reliably and predictably from all of the home’s computers and laptops. Last but not least, they want a server from which they can easily access their home’s content when they are traveling on the road. Products like HP’s home server are just the beginning of this trend towards computing based home serving products. This is another very positive trend for the custom electronics industry because most of these will require professional installation for clients to get the greatest value from these solutions.

Prediction #4:
We will move from switching analogue signals to switching digital signals around the home. RS232 based component analogue switches will yield to RS232 based HDMI switches and ultimately to gigabit data packet switches. The primary hurdle to this movement is digital rights management – we simply can’t get all of our high definition content legally recorded on hard drives that are connected to the home network and the Internet. Once that hurdle is overcome (and we are beginning to see some positive strides in that direction – TiVO To Go now works for their HD Series 3 TiVOs and CableCARDS allow high definition recording in the Microsoft Vista/Extender architecture) then expect that all high definition audio/video content will reside in a server (not unlike the one described in prediction #3 except it will have terabytes and terabytes of storage). This high definition personal video recorder home server will send its content across the gigabit switched network to TVs, computers, laptops, and other mobile electronic platforms throughout the home.

Prediction #5:
Televisions will get smarter. Samsung and Pioneer are already shipping flat screen televisions with Ethernet ports to easily gain access to the home’s audio and video content without requiring a separate set-top box decoder to be locally installed in the room with the flat screen TV. As more and more clients prefer the clean look of just a flat-screen TV on the wall without the plethora of high tech boxes surrounding this monitor these all-in-one data decoder/TV solutions will gain greater and greater appeal. This architecture plays right into our expertise since it requires the design, installation, and control of a centralized media server distributing content to in-wall integrated display screens throughout the home.

Those are my 5 predictions for 2010 – what are yours?

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

cyberManor Overview: The First 10 Years

cyberManor was founded in 1999, started by company president Gordon van Zuiden. In its first few years the company’s focus was based on the custom design and integration of home networks connected to high speed cable and DSL broadband services. After 2001 the company’s skill sets expanded into audio video and home control, providing integrated data/audio/video media distribution, management and automation solutions to over 500 residential clients over the last 10 years. Today cyberManor has 6 employees and revenues this year should top $1.2 million dollars. Last year cyberManor completed over 30 IT/CE convergence projects, about half of these in new construction or major remodels, and the other half were retrofit projects. The average revenue on these projects is about $50,000, with some as large as $300,000.

Mr. van Zuiden has been a guest speaker on the digital home and digital media server classes at EHX and CEDIA over the last 8 years. He has authored monthly columns on the convergence of CE and IT solutions in Electronic House and Residential Systems magazine over the last 7 years. He has also been a keynote speaker at industry outreach events for the IEEE, ASID and NKBA associations over the last several years.

Gordon is currently serving in his second term on CEDIA’s Board of Directors and chairs the Discovery Action Team for CEDIA’s technology council. He was also a Subject Matter Expert involved in developing the initial HTI testing questions for CompTIA and several Digital Media Server courses for CEDIA.

cyberManor’s showroom in downtown Los Gatos, California showcases the latest products in multi-room audio/video and control solutions using both Control4 and Lifeware/Media Center based platforms. Both of these solutions use IP as the primary protocol to transport audio/video and control information to CE AV products at the edge of the network in each room of our showcase installation.

Our company’s growth and success is based primarily upon our client referrals and the company’s media presence - from the monthly columns written by Mr. Van Zuiden to the integrated projects that cyberManor has completed that have been featured in consumer and trade magazines (Electronic House, Residential Systems, cePro).

To help educate on our clients on the benefits of converged IT/CE systems for their home we demonstrate these solutions in our showroom, hand out column reprints that Gordon has written on this subject over the years, and tour them through our showcase integrated homes – such as the Digital Home that we completed for HP at their executive briefing site in Cupertino, California last year.

To maintain the health and integrity of the integrated solutions we install cyberManor offers several levels of customer support. Our standard one year support covers all manufacturers’ warranties and labor for one year. Our fee based silver level of support provides software upgrades and remote troubleshooting service. Our premium gold level of support adds a guaranteed 48 hour response and problem resolution time frame to our silver support level.

Our company website highlights the unique IT/CE skill sets of our company. It includes a detailed description, photos, and schematics of a wide range of our completed IT/CE projects. The site also features consumer videos (from CISCO, CNET, and Lifeware) that highlight the benefits of IT/CE convergence solutions.

Our most public projects to date include:

* One of the first nationally recognized Premise Systems IP based home control system solution for a client in Reno, Nevada. This project was completed in 2004 and recognized as a National Finalist in the 2004 Mark of Excellence awards

* Our company was also the lead designer and integrator for HP’s showcase Digital Home in Cupertino, California. This home has been complete for over a year and shown to thousands of visitors, including many of HP’s strategic alliance customers, national and local press, and hundreds of HP employees. The home features an HP Media Center and Windows Home Server solution extended by Exceptional Innovation’s Lifeware suite of home automation services – including camera, security, lighting, thermostat, and motorized window treatment control.

* In 2008 we completed one of the most extensive and creative implementations of a Microsoft Media Center/Extender/Lifeware integrated solution for a client in Northern California. For this project cyberManor was recognized in the fall of this year as their annual National Ultimate Install Award winner. This December and in January 2009 our company will be recognized on the covers of Residential Systems and CePRO respectively for our award winning work.

cyberManor is proud of our employees’ technical expertise. Our project managers, programmers, and technical engineers have a solid understanding of the design, integration and support of IP based home networking systems. This includes knowledge of how to program and configure network routers, switches and Windows/Mac based operating systems for optimal and reliable network performance.

Our IT designs are often based on Windows Home Server, Media Center, Control4, Sonos, Kaleidescape, Lifeware and Panasonic product platforms. These products complement and provide content to the CE lines that we carry that include Denon, Pioneer Elite, Samsung, and Universal Remote Control. cyberManor frequently uses network attached storage drives at the heart of our integrated system solutions to store and serve the digital audio/video content in our client’s homes.

Our company’s employees are actively involved and encouraged to participate in vendor and trade association training throughout the year. They are trained by vendors that come to our office, via online training courses, and classes taken at CEDIA. This year 5 of our employees took a combined total of 48 hours of training at CEDIA’s national expo in Denver. Our employee’s have training certifications from HTI+, CEDIA Installer Certifications, Lutron, Control4, Lifeware, Channelvision and Universal Remote Control.

To help educate our client’s on the systems that we install for them we provide training and cheat sheets on how to best use their integrated systems. Technical support is also provided by our technician’s that provide on-call or onsite service 7 days per week.

IP: 8 Things you Need to Know

IP – two little letters that now are so important in many of the latest home technology products that we install. IP stands for Internet Protocol. It has become the defacto language that newer electronics products use to communicate with one another in the home (like your computers) and to the outside world via a high-speed Internet connection. With IP connectivity you can distribute audio,video, and data all around the house from digital content you have stored or downloaded from the Internet. Without it you have islands of entertainment or data content in your home, accessible only in the part of your home where the content resides - not what 21st century digital living is all about! For example, we don’t have a water heater in every room that needs hot water – we distribute it through an infrastructure of pipes and fixtures that can transport and dispense hot water. Like the water heater service, we now have hard drives that can distribute their audio/video and data content over an infrastructure of CAT5 computer wiring to IP client devices throughout the home.

Just as you need to know a little about a plumbing system (like where to turn the water off when you’re dishwasher starts leaking!), you need to know some facts about the IP system in your client’s home - the lifeblood of a digital home infrastructure.

1. You can’t touch, see, feel or smell IP. But you can tell if it’s working with your computer by running what is called a PING test. On an XP computer you need to open the RUN command (to get to a DOS prompt) and type in the line:
ping www.yahoo.com. If you get a ping reply you know the computer is connected on your home network and to the outside internet (in this case the yahoo portal). No reply and your IP is not flowing – either the problem is inside your home or with your gateway connection to the outside world (in another column we’re review how to best troubleshoot a down internet connection.)

2. IP network connections used to be on only computers and laptops. Now you can find them on printers, storage drives, thermostats, lighting control systems, A/V receivers, speakers and even pianos!

3. IP is the language of the Internet. It is part of the protocol TCP/IP. Just as English is the dominant language in the world for verbal communication; IP has become the dominant form of data communication – primarily because of the Internet’s phenomenal success.

4. IP enabled products can often be controlled and upgraded from computers and/or over the Internet. This makes them potentially easier to use and upgrade. For example, a TiVO with an IP network connection can display photos from your home’s hard drive or allow you to program it remotely from an Internet connected computer. TiVO without an IP network connection is simply a personal video recorder connected to your television.

5. IP should be a feature that you should look for in each of the AV products that you purchase - it should be one of the most important features that will help you decide between two otherwise similar products.

6. IP can travel over wire or wireless connections. Over wire it can travel up to 300 feet in the home before it needs to be repeated or amplified by a hub or switch. Over a wireless connection it can travel 50 to 150 feet inside the home – but you should know that the farther it has to travel, the slower its data speed will become.

7. IP is a data language. You need to have a basic knowledge of IP addressing, static and dynamic IPs, and private and public IPs to navigate and successfully deploy and troubleshoot IP systems in your home. You’ve learned English language to communicate with your fellow human beings – now you need to learn some basic IP language to communicate with your fellow electronic friends. See number 8 to help you build that knowledge.

8. Read Cisco’s Home Networking Simplified book - a good place to learn more about IP and how to “plumb” your home properly to take best advantage of it. Or take some of the home networking courses offered at a local community college or CEDIA’s or ehExpo's national conferences.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Control4: The Complete IP Connected Home Solution

Since founding cyberManor in late 1999 I have been looking for a home computing infrastructure and automation control software that would replicate the technology control experience one now takes for granted in the corporate world. In the professional workplace one can:

* Easily and reliably connect personal computers (over wired or wireless connections)
* Quickly become skillful at operating many different software applications and hardware platforms because they all follow the very consistent graphical interface standards established by the look and feel of the Windows or MAC operating systems
* Seamlessly add peripheral products (such as network scanners, printers, or storage drives) because they are now automatically discovered by the computer’s operating system and added to the networked environment

If the same experience held true in the today’s home one could easily and reliably connect the home’s technology infrastructure of “clients” (namely computers, audio/video, lighting, security, and HVAC systems) to one another. These systems would be connected to the home network backbone over wired or wireless connections. Each of these home systems (again computers, audio/video, lighting, security, and HVAC) would be easy to operate and control because they all would follow the rules of a graphical interface standardized by a universally accepted home operating system. Finally, when new devices or components are added to the home network (like IP cameras or a new PVR) they would automatically be discovered and added to our home operating experience without the need for any additional programming efforts.

Unfortunately, the home technology environment is significantly more complex than the corporate world. In the workplace there are drop ceilings in which to run CAT5 cables and every component on the office network from computers to printers to cameras have a standardized 10/100/1000 Ethernet port. By contrast, an existing home can have a sauna-like insulated attic in the summer, an animal infested sub-floor crawl space, and fire-blocks in walls that can foil the best laid plans to pre-wire a home with CAT5 cabling. In the corporate world all devices have operating systems that automatically recognize and discover IP addresses devices, in the home computers perform this function well but audio/video equipment, lighting systems, and thermostats do not. In the corporate world all application and equipment control is initiated from a keyboard, mouse and a large desktop screen. The home’s functions must be controlled from a variety of interfaces, such as handheld push button remotes, keypads on various walls, touch-pad “coffee table” remotes, personal digital assistants and even the office computer. In the corporate world when the next generation hardware or software product is connected to the office network it is automatically discovered by the computer operating system and its control begins with a familiar desktop icon. When a new hardware product is added in the home it is very unlikely to connect to any other component on the home network let alone have a user interface in which we are familiar.

To tackle the daunting engineering task of harnessing the home’s heterogeneously complex technology environment comes a company from Salt Lake City, Utah, called Control4 that aims to do for the residential world what Microsoft and Apple did for the corporate world – standardize, simplify, and enrich the use of technology in the home – for today’s and tomorrow’s home systems. From seasoned control veterans, Will West and Eric Smith, Will and Eric founded PHAST Corp. almost 15 years ago), Control4 has been founded on the following fundamental principles:

* An IP switched backbone is fundamental to the interconnectivity of devices in the home
* A single graphical user interface running on multiple different platforms (large screen TV’s, in-wall touch screens, keypads, and/or hand held remotes) should always have the same look and feel to easily control all of the home systems
* Home electronic components should be “auto-discovered” and seamlessly integrated into the home’s technology ecosystem (over wired or wireless connections)

Shipping for over 4 years now (they will be showcasing their latest product line offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January), Control4 and their integrated partners, will demonstrate a full line of audio/video, lighting, and thermostat products that will all connect to one another over a wired 10/100 Ethernet connection, WiFi, or a wireless, reliable, secure, mesh network of ZigBee Pro enabled devices (the IEEE 802.15.4 standard). Control4 will launch a new, rich set of graphical control interface templates to control their suite of IP enabled home products, including a Linux-based control platform, home entertainment media room and whole house audio/video components, intelligent light switches and a network enabled thermostat control.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Place Shifting: The Latest Trend in Home Audio/Video

The personal video recorder is one of the most successful and frequently used components of audio/video gear that we install in our client’s homes. In fact, most of our clients have several recorders – one in the main family room and one in a home theater area and/or master bedroom. These personal video recorders allow our busy clients to watch their favorite shows when they want to watch them anywhere in the home where we have installed these recorders. But what if they want to watch these home recorded shows away from their home – let’s say from their laptop in the comfort of a hotel room with a high speed internet connection?

Such a solution is now possible thanks to a series of technical innovations in the streaming of MPEG4 compressed video. Sony (with their product called LocationFree, see www.sony.com/locationfree) and SlingMedia (www.slingmedia.com) have introduced products this year that are capable of encoding and compressing the audio/video signals coming from the back of a standard definition personal video recorder and stream them to the home’s router. From there they can be received by a Windows PC client attached anywhere in the world on an Internet broadband connection.

The products work like this:
Your client has just checked into their hotel room with high-speed internet access. He/she connects the laptop to the Internet, checks email, and then decides to watch the 60 Minutes episode recorded at home. With the Sony product (for example) they launch a software application called LocationFree. The LocationFree software asks them if they are home or away (the laptop could also be used to capture the streaming 60 Minutes video stream at home). Clicking on the away mode starts the process of connecting the laptop to the client’s home router via a DDNS service that Sony provides. (This DDNS service ensures that the client can always find and connect to their home router even if their home internet service provider dynamically changes the IP address of the home router.)

Once the router connection is established the video stream from the home’s personal recorder starts to play in a window that opens on the laptop. You can even control the video recorder because the client software has IR codes built into the software that emulate the IR codes of the personal video recorder remote. Clicking on the Guide button on the laptop screen issues an IR command sent from the hotel room laptop to their home router and then from the router to the Sony LocationFree BaseStation where the IR code is blasted to the personal video recorder to show the Guide. Very cool!

A real life example
I was at my son’s soccer tournament last month and between games I drove my car with my wireless laptop around the local neighborhood looking for someone’s unprotected wireless access point (this took about a minute – there are so many unprotected wireless access points these days – but that’s the subject of another column!). Once connected to the Internet I launched my Sony LocationFree software and I was able to watch a Davis Cup tennis match on my laptop that I had recorded at home. With a hotdog in one hand and my Davis Cup tennis match playing on my laptop in the other hand – I was in my element! (Another option would have been to launch the Slingbox application on my Apple iPhone via a 3G wireless connection.)

Marrying the convenience of personal video recording with the flexibility of watching your content anywhere in the world is a very appealing technology. Both the Sony LocationFree and the SlingMedia products allow you to do this but before you run off and sell these products to all of your clients you should be aware of the following limitations:

• Your client must have a broadband upload bandwidth of at least 300Kbps from their home. This is the minimum bandwidth requirement to upload video from the home to the remote laptop. When the available bandwidth falls below this level the video transmission becomes unacceptably poor or doesn’t work at all. You can check your client’s upload speed by using speed tools found on a number of websites (like www.dslreports.com). The important concept to understand here is that, in the future, the upload speed of residential high-speed internet access may become as important as download speed. Currently we live in a world most of the digital content we want to have inside our home is located outside the home so download speeds are a priority. Soon, we will want the content that we have inside our home to be available to us anywhere we are and that will place a much higher priority on upload speeds. For this reason, if your client can afford it (and if it’s available), I recommend high-speed residential broadband synchronous services.

• Only one laptop can access your media content at a time. You can purchase multiple client licenses but the streaming video is limited to one client device at a time.

• If you take over the control of the home personal video recorder from your hotel room you should make sure that no one at your home is watching that video recorder at the same time – unless they want to watch what you are watching!

Place shifting of personal video recording is just emerging as a very exciting new product category. To be honest, these new products are still in their infancy and these first generation products don’t always have the image quality and low latency that we would prefer for audio/video enjoyment and control. But over the next few years we will continue to see better audio/video compression algorithms, better encoding and decoding chipsets and faster Internet bandwidth offerings. It’s only a matter of time before placeshifting of personal video recordings becomes as popular as the time-shifting feature is today. If you want to experience this new technology trend first hand I recommend you spend the $300 to $400 to buy the SlingMedia or Sony products – it’s just one more product that leverages and enhances the value of your connected digital home.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Sonos Digital Music System

The Sonos Digital Music System is as dramatic improvement to the distribution of audio digital entertainment content throughout the home as the Kaleidescape Digital Video System is to the residential distribution of high quality DVD content. Both share the following important characteristics:

Outstanding User Interface
The Kaleidescape Digital Video System has won numerous awards for its intuitive and graphic user interface. Video distribution solutions benefit from the fact that a monitor is turned on when you want to watch a movie and Kaleidescape takes full advantage of this by developing a beautiful remote controlled interface that works on any large screen viewing monitor. Whole house audio systems face a challenge in that homeowners do not want to turn on a television to control and watch the music they are listening to – especially if it’s in a room without a TV screen. The Sonos remote control system uses a wireless “iPOD like” remote that lets you see the cover art of the album you are listening to, read the name of the song and gives you full control of the audio source (volume, mute, skip, return, etc.) in any of the home’s listening zones.

Digital Content Storage and IP Distribution Architecture
The Kaleidescape can stream encoded DVD movies flawlessly to up to seven (7) different movie players around the home from its multi-terrabyte server over standard Cat5 wiring and an Ethernet 100BaseT switch. The Sonos Digital Music system can stream WMA, WMV, MP3, AAC (MPEG4) music to up to 32 different Sonos ZonePlayers receivers throughout the home over its 2.4Ghz “SonosNet” wireless or wired connections. To ensure the quality of service for audio connections from ZonePlayer to ZonePlayer, Sonos has developed a wireless “802.11g-like” protocol called SonosNet. A non-trivial technical hurdle that the Sonos engineering team solved was the need to synchronize digital music to all the hubs. A musical lag when you are playing the same song in each room is not acceptable.

Unlike Kaleidescape, which requires storing the digital DVD movie content on their own server (due to digital rights management requirements), Sonos can use whatever hard drive in the home contains the digital music. They recommend that a network storage drive be purchased so that it always remains on as the digital music storage vault for the home.

In addition, Sonos adds the ability to add a local analog source to each of their ZonePlayer receivers. This is an incredibly useful feature because each ZonePlayer can act as a source to the whole house music system. Picture a scenario where a guest arrives at your client’s “Sonos-enabled home” with their iPOD, connects it to the Sonos ZonePlayer in the family room and your client wants to hear the iPOD music in their master bedroom. The Sonos ZonePlayer will encode and stream the iPOD music from the family room ZonePlayer to the Master Bedroom ZonePlayer where it is decoded and played back through the master bedroom sound system. One feature missing in this example is the ability to control external input audio sources from a remote location because the ZonePlayer receiver does not provide any IR or RS232 control of these external sources. Also, the Sonos system currently does not have any in-wall keypad audio control solutions. To solve these issues, we found that the Sonos Digital Music System connected to a “traditional” analog whole house music switching system is a match made in musical heaven.

Marriage with Existing Whole House Audio Systems
While the Sonos Digital Music System can certainly stand on its own as a distributed whole house audio system – there are several benefits to integrating it with the more traditional analog based audio distributions systems like those from Russound, Niles or Sonance. Using the Sonos ZonePlayer as one of the line source inputs to, say a Russound system, you can take advantage of the in-wall keypad controls of the Russound system to select audio sources and provide source control for a given room and still enjoy the benefits of Sonos’s great wireless graphical controller when you select the Sonos input on your Russound keypad. Here’s an example:

You have a client that wants to have an AM/FM tuner, satellite music, XM radio, and digital music as sources to a whole house audio system. You design this Russound 4-source system as you normally would with the appropriate input sources and IR control but now you use the Sonos ZonePlayer (connected on the network to a network storage drive that has the digital music) as an input for the digital music instead of, for example, using the audio out of a computer that contains the digital songs. The benefit of this approach is that the homeowner can now fully see and control the digital music they are listening to in any room of the home (or even in the backyard) from Sonos’s wireless remote – a greatly improved interface over what you usually find on whole house audio controls (unless you move all the way up to the much more costly Crestron or AMX control solutions).

The new Sonos Digital Music System is as revolutionary to the distribution of whole house digital music as the Kaleidescape system is to the whole house distribution of high quality digital video. With an exceptionally easy to use remote, the flexibility to listen to thousands of digitally recorded songs throughout the home and the scalability to easily add new wireless music receivers and remote controls to the home – I predict the Sonos Digital Music System will be a very popular product for new and existing homes.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Microsoft Media Center Solutions Revisited for 2010

After following developments on the Microsoft Media Center platform over the last 7 years and predicting several times that the following year will be the year Media Center takes off in the custom installation channel I'm somewhat gun shy to make that prediction again.

But following the announcements Microsoft made at CEDIA Expo this year and my own beta testing over the last month of the Windows 7 (W7) operating system I am cautiously optimistic that the Media Center interface for the management and distribution of whole house HD TV and photos may be the perfect solution to complement today's custom home control and automation systems.

At CEDIA Expo in Atlanta last year Microsoft made some very key announcements that dramatically improve the value proposition of the Media Center platform in the custom integration channel, specifically:

* Support for CableCARDs in almost all Windows 7 PCs. The restriction that you could only use a CableCARD for those computers that had the Windows Vista CableCARD ready BIOS has been removed. Almost any Windows 7 PC that you buy or build will now support CableCARDs.

* Support for CF (copy freely) recordings. This support allows you to stream un-flagged HD content (almost all HD content except for Showtime and HBO movies is currently un-flagged) recorded on a W7 media center to any other W7 media center in the home. This means that you can use one central W7 media center in the home (which can currently support up to 4 CableCARDs) to stream HD content to all the rooms in the home that have a local W7 Media Center computer. You can even copy this content to W7 laptops to take HD content on the road. In the past, streaming of HD content was possible in Vista but you could only stream to Media Center extenders, a less robust and portable solution.

* Enhanced support for Internet TV content in the electronic program guide of the W7 Media Center, this feature allows you to easily search not only what is available from your local cable provider but also the entertainment options available from the Internet
(a side note - Dish TV was also showing their direct support of the Media Center platform at the CEDIA show to determine the interest from our channel in this solution - we may see this product introduced sometime next year).

* While not publicly announced, Microsoft was showing a W7 version of a Media Center plug in for Netflix at their booth that seamlessly integrated into the Media Center environment

All of these announcements were very promising positive steps towards strengthening the Media Center platform but the continued reluctance of the custom channel to deploy these solutions in our customer's home has always been related more to system reliability than system functionality. The only way to mitigate these concerns (which I have shared to some degree over the years) was to put the Windows 7/CableCARD platform solution to the test in our household and determine its day to day reliability. We installed the following system:

In the family room we have a W7 Niveus Rainier supported by the ATI CableCARD tuner as an AV source for the Samsung DLP TV. In the kitchen we have a 23" HP TouchSmart that was running Windows Vista and upgraded to run Windows 7. In my daughter's room we have another W7 Niveus Rainier connected to a 17" Toshiba LCD. All of the computers are connected over Ethernet CAT 5 wiring to a standard Cisco 10/100 24 port switch in the garage. These are the basics of the system that we have been testing over the last month and the preliminary results are as follows:

* The Windows 7 computers have never locked up, not once.

* We have programmed over 100 shows from almost all of the HD channels that we get from Comcast and they have streamed without any connectivity or video packet errors to the HP TouchSmart in the Kitchen and my daughter's room over that period of time. I have streamed the same show or different shows to these zones error-free and with negligible latency.

* Provisioning the CableCARD to work with The ATI tuner took less than an hour. This process used to be a nightmare but in this installation it worked almost immediately. As they say, your mileage may vary, but the Comcast technicians and our own engineers are getting much more proficient at installing and pairing these products to work in PCs.

* the Windows 7 Media Center platform graphics have been beautifully enhanced. The electronic program guide rivals the best EPGs on the market, including the much loved TiVO interface. The music interface has “Kaleidescape” like beauty with all the cover art appearing on your screen while an album is playing and the photo playback accompanied by music is a very engaging application for any large flat screen TV in the home

* using Windows 7 Media Centers instead of Extenders allows us to enjoy the full functionality of a computer in each of these rooms. For example, internet browsing was not possible with an extender, with a W7 computer that is not an issue. There is no longer a need for a separate TV in the office or children's rooms with computers - for these zones the PC is in fact a full functioning HD TV (either by using a locally installed CableCARD tuner or viewing content that was prerecorded from any CableCARD enabled W7 Media Center computer in the home)

The limitations of this platform still are:

* You still cannot legally record and distribute DVDs from a Media Center to other Media Center or extenders around the home (managed copy functionality is not enabled). This problem can be alleviated however by the upcoming support of Netflix movie downloads for Media Center (this should be out by the time you read this column). There is growing belief in our industry that the future of DVD viewing will come more and more from Internet movie subscription services than from purchased DVDs and the Media Center architecture embraces this trend.

* The streaming of music from a head end media center to media centers located around the home is not synchronized. If you want to play one song throughout the home there will be audio latency issues which are unacceptable to our clients. Until this is resolved (and Microsoft tells me this can be done via a future software upgrade) I recommend that another whole house audio distribution solution be used. We use the Sonos system which gives us the ability to control the music from an iPhone/iTouch, their own handheld controllers or from a desktop client. The last interface is an important one because we now have W7 computers around the home for easy access to the audio control interface screen.

It is important to understand exactly what the strengths of this Media Center architecture are versus the custom home solutions we already design and deploy. Our vision of W7 Media Centers distributed around the home is primarily for the support and control of distributed HD and photo content around the home. While it can support whole house music, videos and home control (with software enhancements from companies like EI-Lifeware) - it is uniquely effective at providing a whole house HD DVR solution that is easily extensible into these other whole house applications with one common interface installed on a relatively inexpensive hardware. Our company has been successful at leveraging this streaming video distribution solution with Control4’s suite of products and these solutions have been very complementary. Control4 gives our clients the synchronized whole house audio, lighting control, camera control, security control, scenes, etc. that they can control from a variety of in-wall, handheld, or touch-screen platforms. This same complementary fit could be applied to Crestron, AMX, HomeLogic, HAI and many other whole house control solutions. (I don't envision Microsoft entering the in-wall keypad or lighting control markets anytime soon so the Media Center platform has to be integrated with solutions from many of the other key partners with which we commonly work.)

In summary, four month testing doesn't guarantee that there will not be glitches down the road. And, after all, we still are talking about watching TV on a PC and for most of us that concept has been less than satisfactory over the years. But these early indicators are very promising and the solutions they provide when they work well are very compelling. I think most of us would agree that if we could start to move away from the complications of HDMI switching of our TV settop boxes to the network based streaming of HD content around the home we would have a more robust and rich solution to offer our clients. I think the year 2010 will be the year we will start deploying these solutions and the W7 Media Center platform will be a key factor in their success.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Building an IP Enabled Home: Brick by Brick

I have been testing a couple of products from a company called HomeLogic (based out of MarbleHead, Massuchusetts, www.homelogic.com, now purchased by Elan) over the last several years that elegantly enables the addition of legacy home control devices to a home network across an IP connection. HomeLogic also has an overall home control platform but the products that intrigued me most were their module based control “bricks” for lighting, climate and irrigation control. The product concept for these products is both simple and elegant.

The Simplicity of the “Brick”
The HomeLogic offering is unique because you don’t have to purchase a complete home control software platform (like Premise, AMX, Crestron, and Control4 to name a few such systems) if you only have a few subsystems that you want to control from any browser window on your IP based home network. HomeLogic’s EdgeBrick products allow you to attach RS232 based products to the IP home network (similar products are available from Lantronix, Global Cache and Barrix) but the unique aspect of the solution provided by HomeLogic is their offering of various software control tabs for each of these EdgeBricks. For example, you just want to control your heating and cooling system in your home - you simply connect the RS232 leads of each home thermostat (you can connect several thermostats, each with a unique ID) to the serial port of the EdgeBrick and the IP port of the EdgeBrick attaches with a CAT5 patch cable to the home’s Ethernet switch. (HomeLogic currently supports HAI, RCS or Aprilaire RS232 based thermostats, (see http://www.homelogic.com/support.html) for a full listing of HomeLogic compatible devices.)

The climate control software (written in JAVA) resides on the EdgeBrick itself, not in a separate server box. Pointing your browser URL to the IP address of the climate EdgeBrick will bring up a web page that allows full control of your home’s thermostat (think about an IP camera – like those from Panasonic - that have this same control capability). With this software interface you can easily:

* Interface with the home thermostat from any browser enabled computer in the home, not just ones that have a specialized client based software loaded on a given computer

* Program thermostat schedules for up four periods per day and three different modes (home, vacation, and away) in an easy to use, intuitive, graphical interface. (Unlike fumbling around to program the thermostat itself with a series of difficult to remember button pushes!)

* Show historical view of climate data (indoor, outdoor and set point) temperatures for a 12 month period.

* Monitor and change the setting of your home’s temperature remotely. Using HomeLogic’s remote access service (which can locate the IP address of your ClimateBrick on your home network even if you have a broadband dynamic ISP hosting service) you can change the home’s thermostat settings from anywhere in the world that you have an Internet connection.

The Elegance of the Tab
The most elegant feature of HomeLogic’s software is that you activite a subsystem’s control by simply clicking on its control tab. Just as you would add control bricks, one at a time to build your IP enabled home, you add sub-system software control tabs one at a time. By adding a second brick for irrigation control (for example), you now add the Irrigation software control to the same screen that contains the thermostat control. Similar to a binder tab that helps one quickly access specific content in a binder, these software tabs steer you directly to the device in the home that you want to control. HomeLogic enables this software concept by allowing one EdgeBrick to be the master device and each of the other Edgebricks in the home (with their own unique IP addresses) to be slave devices to this one master.

In our home I have installed HomeLogic’s Irrigation Brick and it has worked very well. I attached my 16 zone Rainbird irrigation system to a third party product called the Rain8Net (http://www.wgldesigns.com/rain8pc.html) which allows me to convert the contact closure commands of each of my 16 valves to RS232 commands. Then I connected the RS232 port of the Rain8Net product to the HomeLogic IrrigationBrick to connect the sprinkler system to my home network.

Now I enjoy the control benefits of our sprinkler system in a browser graphical interface that has the same look and feel as my thermostat control. From any computer in the home I can adjust watering days and timing schedules, manually select certain zones to be watered, and even look at the watering history of our sprinkler system. Similar to the thermostat control system, I can remotely access our home sprinkler system when I am traveling. If it’s raining at home I can turn off the sprinklers from my laptop in my hotel room!

Until every lighting, thermostat, security panel, irrigation system, pool and hot tub control product we purchase has an IP address that can seamlessly install on a home network with a universally accepted home control software platform (like the Microsoft Media Center perhaps?) then, in my opinion, HomeLogic offers one of the most elegant, scalable, and reliable home control software solutions available. Are your ready to start building your IP home, brick by brick?

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Networking a Grand Piano

Over the course of the last ten years that I have been reviewing, selling, installing and supporting home networking products I rarely come across a product that exemplifies the benefits and enhanced enjoyment of a connected home as well as the grand piano that I gave my wife for Christmas retrofitted with the Opus7 Music System from PianoDisc (http://opus7.net/). Normally I write this blog about a class of products without endorsing any particular product to let the professional integrator decide which make and model best fit their needs. In this column, however, I have to decided to endorse a given product since the Opus7 Music System is in a class by itself.

The Opus7 Music System, released in 2004, adds a silent Linux based computing platform attached to the underside of any grand piano. Opus7 supports two primary file types: MIDI and MX3 (compressed digital audio and MIDI in the same file). The piano is always controlled by the MIDI component of the file and there are two separate forms of accompaniment. Symphony accompaniment is generated via MIDI messages sent to the internal SymphonyPro sample-based MIDI synthesizer. The SymphonyPro synthesizer can provide up to 128 different sampled instrument sounds, everything from bass and drums in a jazz trio to a whole symphony orchestra. Additionally, "live" (recorded) music can accompany MX3 playback. The "live" music can consist vocals and other sounds not available via the SymphonyPro. Both of these audio enhancements to the piano acoustics are amplified and sent to the stereo speakers also attached to the underside of the piano.

The computing platform has a wired 10/100 Ethernet connection or a bridged 802.11b wireless connection to connect the piano wired or wirelessly to the home network switch backbone. Now one can control the songs played on the piano from any browser connected workstation in the home, whether that be a desktop, a laptop, or one of the newer touch screen web-tablets. In addition, since the piano is connected to the home network one can move MIDI songs from an office computer onto the Opus7 Music system for piano playback or take songs that have been played and recorded on the piano hard drive and move them back to the office computer. I took piano songs recorded by my nephew over Christmas and attached them to an email that I sent to all my extended family members (and to potential recording studios, my nephew is that good!).

The fact that the Opus7 Music system is attached to the home network (and therefore to a broadband Internet connection) means that the Opus7 can now download piano MIDI files directly from the Internet for playback at home. PianoDisc has set up a file server with a few of these songs that demonstrate the powerful feature that an Internet library of music can add to their piano. Instead of purchasing individual shrink-wrapped piano CDs or floppies one could download the songs directly to the piano and purchase them by credit card from the office computer. Or, imagine a monthly audio subscription service like those offered by Rhapsody.com for Piano MIDI files and you can envision how all of those grand pianos (that often sit idle in our client’s homes) can suddenly be brought to life!

Last, but not least, one can connect the audio output of the piano plus symphonic orchestration to a whole house music distribution system. The same beautiful music one hears directly from the piano inside the house can now be heard from the backyard deck or patio speaker system…a great addition for this summer’s barbeques.

I obviously get excited when I write about a product like the Opus7 from PianoDisc because it clearly demonstrates the increased value of adding networked connectivity and broadband Internet access to your home’s electronics. The Opus7 does much more than today’s existing piano players that are limited to input from discrete floppy disks or CDs and controllable from fixed key IR remotes. Now one can enjoy a product with a potentially limitless database of music, playable in any play-list one can dream up (and time schedule if you’re so inclined….I set our piano to play “Hail to the Chief” at 7AM each morning so when the kids wake up they are at proper attention when I walk into the kitchen for breakfast) and controllable from any of the increasing number of rich graphical computing platforms in the home, be they PCs or Macs.

Your home's broadband connection that was originally used to share high speed internet access and download email has now spilled over into providing entertainment content not only for the home AV systems but now for a product as sophisticated as a grand piano. Products like the Opus7 from PianoDisc give you an exciting solution that adds enduring value to your digitally enhanced home.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Compool Hot Tub/Pool Controls on an Android Phone

In our home we have a Compool 3810 controller and I wanted to be able to turn our hot tub on and off from our Android phone. To make this work I downloaded a copy of SoftCP from the Pentair website (see http://12.4.181.70/cp-006.htm) onto a Windows 98 laptop. (This software will only work on Win95/98 computers). I then connected the serial port of the laptop to the Compool part number MOD-RS485 for serial communication to the Compool 3810 keypad mounted on our master bedroom wall.

The next step was to download WinVNC server onto my Windows98 laptop (see: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/windows/21413&vid=76842). I used the laptop as a host to my Windows7 client computer on the kitchen where I could see the SoftCP control software that was running on the Windows 98 laptop.

At this point I opened up a port on my Linksys router to establish a remote desktop connection to the Windows7 computer in the kitchen. I downloaded a copy of the Android Ap called Remote Desktop Client from www.xtralogic.com and now am able to connect directly to the Windows7 computer showing the SoftCP control screen from my Android and turn on and off my hot tub from anywhere that my Android has a 3G or 802.x wireless connection. See the image above.

Intelligent Front Door Locks

Over the years we’ve seen the proliferation of IP enabled devices spread throughout the home. Initially these devices were found in the home office – such as the router, wireless access point, computers, and network printers. Then, as more and more of our personal content became digitized – such as our photos, home movies, and music there was a spread of IP connectivity into our family room where we could view and listen to this content across the home network and onto our large screen family room TV. Products like Apple TV, TiVO, and XBOX gave us these new entertainment options. Over the years we’ve enhanced these entertainment offerings in the family room TV with Internet based entertainment services, such as downloadable movies from Netflix, online gaming, and streaming TV from websites like Hulu and YouTube.

Now we’re seeing the next generation of IP connectivity in the form of home control and security. To be sure, products like Control4, Lifeware, Crestron, AMX, HomeLogic, HAI, iControl, Savant and many others have been adding IP based control systems in the home for the last several years. In previous blogs I’ve also written about my IP based Chumby alarm clock (which I have found to be very useful, it always tell me exactly the correct time and streams wake up music from my Pandora favorite channels) and our IP based piano from PianoDisc which plays any MIDI file that I can search on Google. My sprinkler systems are IP controlled and IP cameras have become one of our company’s standard offerings, especially for our clients with second homes.

But the latest march of IP connectivity into products that have traditionally been as “dumb as a door knocker” is what now captures my integration imagination. This summer we’re seeing the first releases of residential IP controlled door entry systems. Door entry products from Black and Decker (their Baldwin and Kwikset lines, see http://www.bdhhi.com/accesscontrol/) and Schlage (http://consumer.schlage.com/LiNK/product_tour/default.asp)
now offer the homeowner the ability to add intelligent control and monitoring of their door entry systems. Anyone with a broadband connection, router, and computer or web enabled phone can set and release permanent or temporary access codes, read who has entered a door and when they entered, and lock or unlock doors remotely. In addition, when these systems are linked into home control systems from many of the companies mentioned in the previous paragraph door locks can be integrated with security and lighting systems to automatically arm or disarm security systems or turn on or turn off lighting scenes.

These new IP based door access products communicate their status to the home network over Zigbee or Z-wave mesh network protocols and are powered by batteries built into the locking mechanism so that no additional wiring is required to enable these products. Now your home’s entry control system can be more like your automobile’s – one key fob and you can click and unlock or lock all of your home’s doors, along with turning on or off the appropriate entry or exit lights.

In my opinion, these new door access products represent a watershed event for integrated, intelligent devices in the home. Black and Decker and Schlage are large, well established consumer product companies that are now advancing their products intelligence in addition to enhancing their appearance and mechanical functionality. With the widespread adoption of always on broadband internet access in the home, web enabled cell phones, and now the greater acceptance of the Zigbee and Zwave mesh wireless protocol standards the table is now set for a much greater number of manufacturers to add IP intelligence to their product line at affordable price points. Already we’re beginning to see a number of products released with IP connectivity that report energy consumption of electrical products around the home (see the Watts Up line of products at https://www.wattsupmeters.com/secure/about.php)
and I can envision the day in the near future when many of our kitchen and laundry room appliances will have IP connectivity to our home network and our cell phone control points across Zigbee and Zwave communication bridges. The infrastructure to wirelessly add and control intelligent devices is now in place for millions of homes across America and the opportunity for large consumer appliance and hardware manufacturers to add IP intelligence to their products is very compelling. As custom electronic integrators our domain of integration expertise has never been broader – or more exciting!

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Networked Electrical Energy Control Solutions

One of the higher priorities on our client’s cost cutting list has become their monthly electrical bill – a recurring cost that our custom electronic solutions appear to negatively impact. But we don’t have to be the bad guys with respect to increasing our client’s electrical bills. Thanks to relatively new, networkeable, powerline monitoring solutions, IP enabled and power sensing power strips we can give our networked clients the information to monitor and control much of the equipment that we sell to them, greatly reducing the electrical consumption of our solutions and adding a greater awareness to all the electrical usage in our client’s homes. In this blog I will review a couple of those products.

Electrical Usage Monitoring
A relatively new product from a Charleston, South Carolina called TED (The Energy Detective) is an ingenious product that can be easily retrofitted into any existing home to measure and graphically display all of a home’s electrical energy usage - down to a 10 watt accuracy! At the circuit panel you install the 2 current transformers around the incoming power lines coming into the home. These transformers then transfer real-time energy consumption data over the home’s power lines to a monitoring screen that you can plug in anywhere in the home. I have mine plugged into an outlet next to my office computer where I can keep an eye on every kilowatt that is being used. In addition, the TED 1001/2 has a USB port that can send the data it collects to my computer so I can graphically see the hourly, daily, and monthly KWH that my home consumes. Last year our home averaged 2400KWH/month - over the last 3 months we have dropped our average monthly usage down to about 1800KWH simply by becoming more aware of our electrical consumption and actively turning off devices that were 7/24 energy sinks. At 34 cents/KWH that represents about a $200/month saving - thus covering the cost of this device in only 1 month!

When you actually see the hour by hour usage of your electrical consumption you are much more prone to reduce it. Just as the Prius dashboard monitors mile per gallon on a real time basis, letting the driver know how they can immediately improve their MPG by reducing the pressure on the gas pedal – this home monitoring device alerts you to unnecessary lights being turned on, computers left on, pool pumps that may be on too long, inefficient refrigerators, and so on. In the next generation TED device (the 5000 series due out shortly) they will be able to deliver this data to a gateway that you can plug in anywhere in the home and it will send monitoring information that you can view on any computer or from their ZIGBEE enabled monitoring device that you place in any convenient location in the home. They have already announced partnerships with Control4 and Exceptional Innovations and we expect to see the integration of their energy monitoring portals in these two home control software solutions by this fall. I would anticipate by this time next year that electrical monitoring will be a standard offering in all of our custom control solutions.

IP Based and Power Sensing Power Strips
Once the obvious steps have been taken to reduce electrical power consumption in the home we can turn our attention to devices that can schedule or trigger power to be reduced in the home. For under $600 APC has introduced an IP based power strip (the model AP7900/7901) that can be rack mounted and uses a web based scheduler to turn on and off any device we install in the rack. If whole house audio amplifiers and not used between midnight and 6AM, we can turn them off, if media servers are not used during that same time period, we can turn them off. If the client goes away on vacation we could turn everything off in the rack (except, for example, their personal video recorders) while they are on vacation. If this sounds like the beginning of a recurring revenue model based on providing energy monitoring for our client’s homes – you’re getting the right idea. For a power sensing solution for the AV gear in your surround sound zones, APC has introduced the P7GT (lists for under $50) which will sense power going to the TV set. If there is not enough power to turn on the TV then the receiver, Blu-Ray players, gaming stations, (up to 3 devices) will be completely turned off – no vampire power is leaked to keep these products in a “sleep mode”. You could use the same power sensing power strip in the office to turn off printers, scanners, and fax machines when the main computer is turned off.

These products provide very cost-effective solutions that highlight the concept of “negawatts” (reducing power consumption) over megawatts (adding power sources). As the custom integrators of our networked client’s homes we are in the perfect position to education, install and train our client’s on how these products can reduce their monthly utility bills and mitigate their concern that our products adversely affect their monthly electrical consumption. Custom home control solutions will not only offer comfort, convenience, and security - but energy management control which will positively affect our client’s monthly cash flow – a solution perfectly suited for today’s challenging economic environment.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)

Chumby - Internet Connected Alarm Clock

I am always looking for network connected devices that truly add value to our client’s broadband connected homes – after all, that was the basic tenet upon which our company, cyberManor was founded. Of course we all know about the value of our laptop and office computers connected to broadband Internet in the home and we have come to love our Pandora and Rhapsody enabled Sonos whole house audio systems, but what about the Internet appliances we heard so much about at the beginning of this decade? The internet enabled oven, refrigerator, coffee pot and so on? Well, many of those ideas have come and gone – clever ideas that were just not ready for prime time. But in 1998 I read about a new internet appliance device called Chumby (see www.chumby.com) and after purchasing one earlier this year and using it on a daily basis I can strongly endorse it as a must have product for our connected home clients.

So what exactly is a Chumby? The simplest answer is that it is a bedroom alarm clock that never shows the wrong time. The technical answer is that it is a 350MHz ARM processor running Linux with 64MB of SDRAM and 64MB of NAND flash and a 3.5-inch 320x240 resolution touchscreen capable of playing video or displaying photos. But after using it to display photos, news, traffic reports, and even weather I’ve come to the conclusion that I can get all that information once I get out of bed and travel a few yards to my always on, internet enabled computer in the office. What I really needed for my wife and I was a bedroom alarm clock that had the following features:

* A clock that would always give the accurate time and I wouldn’t have to reset each time the power would go down
* One that could easily be set for different wake up times, one for me, one for my wife
* A snooze button that is easy to set and customize
* Wake up music customized to my preferences
* A clock I could easily read from anywhere in the room, yet dimmed at night so I wouldn’t be kept awake by a brightly illuminated clock

And Chumby does all those things easily and elegantly. Setting up multiple alarm times is simply done from an onscreen menu that lets you store customized alarm settings that include the wake-up time, your preferred “snooze” time, and the music that comes on when the alarm sounds. The wake up music can come from your own MP3 music collection or from a wide variety of Internet music streaming sites. Best of all, each of these alarm parameters can be set independently so when my wife sets her alarm she has her own “snooze” and alarm music choices and I have mine. Once the alarm is set at night we select the night mode option and the bright, easy to read clock dims to a level that can be easily seen up close but dark enough to fall asleep without a distracting light.

The Chumby leverages the assets of the digital home we create for our clients. All of our client’s homes have broadband internet access, a router, and multiple wireless access points - Chumby uses the home’s networking infrastructure to accurately set the clock (even after a power failure) and to provide the Internet streaming wake-up music. Even if the Internet goes down in the middle of the night Chumby has a CPU clock that will continue to accurately tell time and wake you up at the time you have set with it’s internal beep alarm. As I mentioned earlier, I could stream my stock quotes and photos (for example) to my Chumby from my office computer if that was a feature that I wanted to implement. But to keep it simple for my wife and I we just use it as an alarm clock - one that is always accurate (thanks to its internet connection) and easily customized and programmed (thanks to its intuitive touchscreen display).

When I reflect back on groundbreaking networking IP based products in the home over the last 8 years that have gained significant traction and use in our client’s home I think of Sonos for whole house music systems, Kaleidescape for whole house digital movie distribution and now I’ll go out on a limb and say that Chumby will redefine our expectations for the master bedroom alarm clock radio. At $180 it is not an inexpensive alarm clock but for our clients that have spent over six figures for our customized integrated electronic solutions for their home it’s a nice gift we can give them that they will use every day, sits a foot or two away from where they sleep, and remind them of our company’s services each time they use it. In my opinion, that’s an investment worth making.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)