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Interoperable Remote Controls
Lord Prox writes "From the HAVi website:
"Ever dreamed of how your ideal home could function in the new millennium? A TV with voice recognition capability? Or connected to a video telephone link so that the TV is muted and calls are answered automatically by a voice command? How about a video camera that automatically displays a picture on the TV screen when a visitor arrives; or starts a recording if the same thing happens unexpectedly during the night?"
Apparently 8 of the leading consumer electronics companies are trying to get rid of all those remotes and do some cooperation over IEEE 1394. Whitepapers and FAQ available."
Since it seems to be slashdotted (about pages say "Temporarily Unavailable"), there's an in-depth article over at ExtremeTech.
The interchangeable remotes is nice, but what looks like a real killer app is that we'll have far fewer wires. Just plug everything into a hub, and it's connected to all other devices.
Maybe we'll even be able to get rid of a few of those power cables if we can have some low power devices that can be powered through the connector.
No, Firewire is pretty much the only option, unless you want your TV and VCR communicating over Serial SCSI or Fibre Channel (the two serial SCSI interfaces other than Firewire).
Yikes! First, you'd need a very smart device to be able to form ethernet and TCP/IP packets, deal with error checking, addressing, and everything else ethernet and TCP/IP (or UDP/IP) have to do. So, Firewire has a tiny fraction of the overhead, while not requiring you to wory about addressing and more.
Firewire devices usually have pass-through, so you can daisy-chain them... Never see that with ethernet.
Can you imagine how much computing power it would require to send raw video and audio data over ethernet? Sure, it would be possible with a computer, but your VCR and DVD player doesn't have a 3GHz processor, nor would you want it to require one...
It's more than 30 feet, and you can use numerous repeaters if you need to... Not really a problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What job does your wife do?
Fortunatelly for me, my wife is an IT professional and can appreciate both the advantages of this setup (our CDs are instantly available throughout the house, we can remotely retrieve caller-id information on last calls, setup customized alarm response scenarios, and so on) and the inevitable bugs (the first friends to ring our doorbell were were greeted by an answering machine message).
However, getting the behavior of the system just right took us more than a year, I am still being very conservative when I tweak something (I am never introducing changes to it before leaving for a vacation), and there were times where we discussed the system's interface over a graphical depiction of state machine diagram. I am sure the /. crowd thinks this is the way to go, but I also think there will be people who might find such a setup a bit bewildering.
Diomidis Spinellis - Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
#include "/dev/tty"
Ethernet? No. FireWire is designed for hubless, daisy-chainable, high speed, peer-to-peer device communications and control from the ground up. And you are incorrect about the distance limitations. Feel like you need TCP/IP specifically? No problem.
Additionally, FireWire is already widely used on almost all digital video cameras, decks, and equipment, is emerging on DVD-A devices, and is the standard interconnect for OpenCable set-top boxes specified by CableLabs.
This was what FireWire was made for. Unfortunately, its adoption and use has been crippled by an entertainment industry deathly afraid of the prospect of 100% digital transport, copies, recording, and manipulation by the end customer. What a shame.
IEEE-1394b, the current iteration of the standard, supports speeds from 100 to 3200 Mbps at distances up to 100 m, and supports its "native" 9-conductor shielded twisted-pair copper, ordinary CAT-5, and various flavors of optical cabling.
See the informative IEEE-1394b Technical Brief and What is 1394? for more information.
For even more information, including information about Wireless FireWire, see Intel's 1394 Technology site.
I want the ABILITY to switch to a channel to see the front door cam when I hear the doorbell (Or better yet a text crawl across the bottom of the screen. like my caller ID box does.
The "automatic" stuff does nothing but piss off users.. Being a Home automation hobbiest and on the side installer/integrator (Yes I have designed and installed home automation systems for other people)
I know what people hate... and they absolutely hate things that assume what they want.
Besides, all of this is possible right now (except the text crawl I mentioned) as I have installed 3 such systems already into home automation/theatre systems....
doorbell rings or motion detector senses motion near the front door. activate alerter (light flash, nice doortone while fading down the background music/tv sound/stereo/whatever, select my front door cable tv channel, pick up phone and dial 44 for the front door and talk with them... press # to buzz the door open.
some of you say "get up and look" but this is not really feasable for the 6500sq foot 3 story home that 99.997% of these systems are in.
my 1150sq foot flat? it's silly. but I still saw the kids trying to spraypaint my car last night so I could hit the all lights on button and unlock the doggie door to watch my german shepard tear the arse out of one of the punks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.