patrickWeb

Home Automation

Monday, June 9, 2008

Roku

Television About fifteen years ago one of my children worked at Blockbuster. One day I told him that Bockbuster would be history because people would be downloading their movies from the Internet. Yeah, right Dad. Ok, I was a bit ahead of my time. In the intervening years there have been numerous companies started to offer various ways to get movies via the Net but none have gotten much traction. The most successful innovation has been Netflix which offers 100,000 movies and an incredibly efficient distribution system for DVDs. The barriers to a downloading or streaming approach have included technology cost, inadequate bandwidth, complexity, device incompatibilities, and intellectual property concerns.

Then along came the Netflix Roku. The snazzy new device may be like manna from heaven for movie lovers. I have had previous experience with Roku. A few years ago I installed a Roku box for pictures. It enables the display of digital pictures on any TV in the house via the home local area network and can be a nice thing at holiday time. The Roku for Netflix movies is a fraction of the size and allows watching up to 10,000 movies or TV episodes on any TV in the house, if you have a video distribution system, or if you don't then you can use the Roku with the TV of your choice -- home theatre, HD, non-HD, any TV. I took the Roku out of the box, plugged in the power supply, and connected the cables to the video jacks. You then need to connect the Roku to the Internet. You can either plug it into your home LAN or connect via WiFi. The hookup took about three minutes. The TV then displays a code which you enter at netflix.com and you are then activated. A new tab is added to your account at Netflix labeled "Watch Instantly". You make a selection and it shows up on the Roku screen on your TV. You push the play button on the Roku remote and the movie starts streaming. I was watching a movie within five minutes of taking the Roku out of the box.

Streaming is different than downloading. There is no hard drive on the Roku. The movie comes from a server at Netflix directly to the Roku. Some buffering obviously takes place as I detected no jitters or pixelation. I was quite impressed with the quality. Looks like a DVD. Does this mean the end of DVDs? Yes, but it will take quite a while. Music is shifting to digital but there are still a lot of CDs sold. The transition for DVDs will take longer for a number of reasons. Streaming requires a stable and reliable one million bit per second connection. In theory, any DSL or Cable Internet provider should be able to provide that but in practice it is spotty. The trend is certainly in the right direction. HD streaming is not yet available but surely it will soon. That will require more bandwidth. So far only 10% of the Netflix collection is available for streaming. Not sure how fast they will be able to convert the rest.

The pricing is good. If you already subscribe to Netflix under any plan of $9.99 per month or more then you get unlimited streaming at no extra cost. The Roku unit is $99 plus shipping. Movies and TV episodes are selected via the web site just like picking a DVD. All things considered, I think Netflix and Roku hit a home run. Not perfect but you can see the beginning of the end of DVDs.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Media, Personal Computing, WiFi June 9, 2008 06:00 PM

Sunday, June 1, 2008

The Home Office

I have been experimenting with the design of a home office for decades. Since most of my hobbies (except motorcycling) take place at home and also being a longtime believer in telecommuting, the home office is where I spend the most time. It did not make sense to me to have an expensive living room and use it once per year and have an inexpensive home office that gets used every day -- when not traveling.

Even though WiFi is a big help, there are still a lot of wires, cables, devices, and power supplies scattered around an office. In a previous home I had built a false wall beneath a desktop and was able to hide most of the cables. It was not perfect but it convinced me that much more could be doneto make a home office efficient and comfortable.

At the end of 2001 it was time for e-tirement and I decided to design a home office in the new home we were building. With the assistance of Neal Zimmerman, a home office architect in West Hartford, Connecticut, a lot of ideas came together. Neal is quite famous as an office designer and is author of At Work At Home. The project has lead to many press inquiries which in turn resulted in two TV stories and quite a few magazine features about the room where I spend most of my time. There are references to the coverage in both the home automation and "in the news" categories of patrickWeb.

The latest story just appeared last week and is called "Designing a Dream Home Office". The interview and story were done by Diana Ransom at SmartMoney.com.

Home Automation, People June 1, 2008 02:00 PM

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Innovations That Will Change Our Lives

The annual "IBM Next Five in Five" is a list of predicted innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The list is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs around the world that could make these innovations possible. Following is a sampling of the five areas.

The press is covered with stories about all things "green". IBM believes the technology is actually going to make it easy to be green and save money in the process. A range of "smart energy" technologies will enable us to manage our personal "carbon footprint". As data begins to run through our home electrical system, appliances, air conditioners, lights, and computers, we will become connected to a "smart" electrical grid, making it possible to turn our appliances on and off using a web browser from a PC or cell phone. In addition to alerting you about leaving appliances on when they could be off, we will be able to establish rules to be followed to automatically conserve energy. Reports will show us electrical usage just like we track our cell phone minutes. Intelligent energy grids will also enable utilities to provide you with the option to use only green energy sources such as solar and wind.

The way we drive will be changing dramatically. In the next five years, IBM says our cars will connected to the roads we drive on and thereby we will be safer and remain out of traffic jams. The technology will keep traffic flowing smoothly, cut pollution, curb accidents, and make it easier and less stressful for us to get where we are going. Intelligent traffic systems will make real-time adjustments to traffic lights and divert traffic to alternate routes while our cars will communicate with each other and with sensors along the road -- allowing them to behave as if they have 'reflexes' so they can take preventive actions under dangerous conditions. When traffic is jammed up alternative routes will be activated.

Since we are what we eat, we should know what we eat. With foods being sourced across international borders, the need to know exactly what we eat has never been more important. According to IBM, in the next five years, new advancements in software and wireless radio sensor technologies will enable us to know the exact source and make-up of the food we buy -- the climate and soil the food was grown in, the pesticides and pollution it was exposed to, the energy consumed to create the product, and the temperature and air quality of the shipping containers it traveled in on the way to our dinner table.

In the next five years, IBM says our cell phones will become our wallets, ticket brokers, concierge, bank, shopping buddy, and tour guide. New technology will allow us to snap a picture of someone wearing an outfit we want and will automatically search the web to find the designer and the nearest shop that has the outfit in stock. We will then see what that outfit would look like on our personal avatar – a 3-D representation of our self on our phone, and ask our friends to check it out online and give their opinion. When we turn on our phone in a city we are visiting, it will automatically provide us with local entertainment options, activities, and dining options that match our preferences -- and then make reservations and purchase tickets for us.

Perhaps the most important area where IBM sees major advances is healthcare. Doctors will get enhanced “super-senses” to better diagnose and treat us. In the next five years, our doctor will be able to see, hear and understand our medical records in entirely new ways. In effect, doctor’s will gain superpowers – technologies will allow them to gain x-ray like vision to view medical images and super sensitive hearing to find the tiniest audio clue in our heart beat. Our avatar will allow doctors to click on a part of our body and then visualize the relevant information for that part of us. The hospital system will then be able to compare those visual and audio clues to thousands of other anonymous patient records and be able to be much more precise in diagnosing us and providing us with a personalized treatment plan.

Some of the innovations IBM is predicting may seem like a stretch but the basics of all of them are already in place. If we were to step back five years it is likely most of us would not have foreseen how we would be doing on the Internet today.

Other IBM annoncements made in December

Gadgets, Healthcare, Home Automation, IBM, Internet Technology, Mobile January 6, 2008 12:04 PM

Thursday, November 1, 2007

WiFi Update No. 15

WiFi Antenna JiWire is now listing 202,894 WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. Where is Wifi headed? I don’t claim to have a crystal ball but I believe the evolution continues to look very much like what we have seen before with the Internet and the World Wide Web. There was a long list of reasons fifteen years ago for why the Web would never turn into something serious -- certainly not into something that could be used for secure business transactions. The same list of shortcomings is at times attributed to WiFi even today – security, scalability, reliability, business model, etc. Just like the Web, WiFi is grass roots, standards based, and very decentralized. Just like with the Web, WiFi has become mainstream. The benefits are compelling. There are active debates about whether WiMax will replace WiFi -- it may or may not. (See WiFi Update No. 8 for more about WiMax). Odds look good to me at this point but not a sure thing. What is a sure thing is the continued evolution and adoption of wireless broadband.

WiFi and other wireless technologies are making the Internet “always on” and extending it to more people and more devices at more locations. This will result in more people doing more transactions which in turn will fuel the continued growth of information technology spending which in turn will provide more productivity to the economy. The constant question over the past fifteen years has been about where the money is in WiFi. The ultimate beneficiaries are consumers but the information technology industry will continue to benefit also as hardware, software and services will be needed to support the growth.

WiFi will have a major impact on the telecommunications industry. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg. The telecommunications companies have made a quiet embrace on WiFi but don't really want it to catch on too fast so that people can use Skype for a call to Europe for a few cents per minute instead of a cellular call for $1.49 per minute. In the long run the increase in Internet usage made possible by WiFi will mean more “bits on the wire”; i.e. more traffic and utilization of the backbones of the Internet which are provided by the telecom industry. In spite of the slow embrace, the telcos will find that Internet telephony will emerge as a major application on the Net even though it will help reduce "long distance" revenue dramatically. More devices with WiFi will mean more choices for consumers -- something that the telcos don't like. They would much rather see us locked into a two year contract with a phone of their choice. They won't be able to do that much longer as consumers wake up to what is possible.

The telecommunications industry needs to start thinking differently about the Internet. Especially in the U.S. they still think that the Internet is one of the many services that you can get via a telecom service. Unfortunately, they have it backwards. Internet telephony (a voice conversation) is one of the many things you can do with the Internet! “Voice” is just another Internet application. The handwriting is on the wall.

WiFi hardware for home and business has become very affordable and reliable. Doesn't seem that long ago that a WiFi access point was more than $1,000, required a lot of electricity, and had limited speed, poor security, and utilized a very early version of the 802.11 standard. Last month I installed a Linksys "Wireless-N Gigabit Security Router with VPN". The standard has evolved from "b" to "g" to "n" with increasingly better security, speed, and range. What I like most about this new device is the VPN feature. A Virtual Private Network is not a new idea but the implementation of the VPN in the new Linksys device is impressive. A second unit is installed at the "getaway" house in Pennsylvania. A simple procedure lets you create a "tunnel" between the two houses directly from one router to the other. You can be in either place and have access to everything on a computer int he other place just as though it was plugged into the local area network. It basically allows a LAN (local) at each end to be connected by the WAN (wide area network aka the Internet). All the trafic through the "tunnel" is encrypted. There are many uses but most important to me are security and HVAC control. From either house it is very simple to check the temperature at the other, turn the heat up or down, set or reset security, or "see" what is going on through a web camera. You can also install a VPN client on your laptop and have "local" access to both homes while you are on the road.

Meanwhile, computer engineers at the University of Massachusetts have built a wireless communications network called TurtleNet which includes waterproof computers attached to the shells of snapping turtles. Without disturbing any of the daily activities, the turtles can swap information whenever they within 500 feet of each other. The biologists believe that the data gained will help the species in the long run.

Subway Surfing (first patrickWeb WiFi story)

Archive of other patrickWeb WiFi stories

Pringles Can (The Famous)

WiFi Antennas

Wireless Communities

Home Automation, Internet Technology, WiFi November 1, 2007 09:46 PM

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

New Home for patrickWeb

Server It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site -- ibm.com/patrick -- was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York and then in 2003 moved patrickWeb over to Interland which was subsequently acquired and became Peer1. The dedicated IBM server at Peer1 in Miami has been very good for the past four years but managing it has become a bit complex and time consuming. With all the bad guys out there trying to hack into anything and everything there is a need for near constant surveillance -- even with all the automated tools. I decided that having a shared server with constant and professional monitoring was better than having a dedicated server with part time security inspections. patrickWeb's new home is at DreamHost.

DreamHost is an employee owned company. They seem to have a passion for providing solid web hosting at a very affordable price. For $7.95 per month you get more capacity than I can imagine using. They have no telephone support but the combination of a really good interface to their hosting environment plus a good Knowledgebase and normally responsive email support makes me feel confident. One thing I like is their status page where you can always see what is going on. Adding and managing databases is a piece of cake and Dreamhost includes full backup "snapshots" of your data at various regular intervals -- hourly, daily, and weekly.

Last weekend I bit the bullet and began the move of patrickWeb and other sites and related email that I manage over to Dreamhost. I changed the DNS servers at Network Solutions to point to the Dreamhost servers in Los Angeles instead of the Peer1 server in Miami. The change propagated through the Internet in a roughly a day and most everything works. There are a few glitches on patrickWeb that I haven't figured out yet. If you see some pages on the site that have a missing menu, that is one of the issues I am working on. Feedback on broken things is always welcome.

The cost, speed, and reliability of DreamHost is just one more reminder of how much the Internet is being woven into our lives. Not that long ago it was necessary to get a CD and install software on your PC to be enabled to utilize an application. Now you can get almost any application online. In the early days of dial-up modem connections to the Internet it wasn't practical to depend on the Net for applications. With "always-on" connections, high speed, dramatically low cost storage, and impressive new Web 2.0 interfaces (such as kayak.com), the Internet is really becoming the computer. The next phase is surely going to move that capability to our handheld and mobile devices. The Nintendo Wii with WiFi and the Opera browser offers a glimpse of the future that is right in front of us.

Home Automation, Internet Technology, Personal Computing April 18, 2007 02:12 PM

Friday, March 23, 2007

Home Automation (update)

Thanks for all the feedback on the BusinessWeek magazine and video pieces. Seems to be a lot of interest in home automation. I will continue working on the series of stories that I promised. I just realized that BW has archived the video version of the story. It is still available and I have updated the link below. Unfortunately, you have to watch a short video advertisement at the beginning. I don't like this as you may have gathered from my various stories about advertising.

The story ran in the January 22, 2007 issue of the magazine, pages 82-83.The follow-on filming ended up on BusinessWeek Weekend (carried by ABC-TV) on the Sunday after Christmas. Here are links to the story and video.

King Of His Digital Castle (magazine)
Ultimate Wired Home: A look at a computer-controlled home (video)

Not so sure about "master" and I certainly don't think of my home as a "castle" but now that the cat is out of the bag, I have decided to write a series of stories to share the details about the home automation system in the hope that it will be useful to others. I will include what went into the planning, what technology choices I made, the design choices, and what I have learned. Stay tuned.

Home Automation March 23, 2007 03:40 PM

Friday, January 26, 2007

Home Automation - Part 2 (Planning)

Home automation planning The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don't have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a money pit. The first step in developing a plan is to establish the scope.

Home automation is a broad term. I would define it simply as automating things in your home. The age-old and most trivial example is the "automated" coffee pot that comes on automatically at a certain time and when you arrive in the kitchen the coffee is ready. At the other end might be an automated home theatre. When you push the "Watch a movie" button in the kitchen, the lighting begins to dim behind you and light up in front of you on your way into the theatre. As the screen comes down from the ceiling, the projector rises from a cabinet in front of it. As the projector bulb warms up the lighting in the theatre synchronously dims until it is movie time. There is a wide range of things in between these two examples. I would break the scope into the following areas below. Any one of them can add a lot of fun and functionality.

System design
Security
Lighting control
Audio distribution
Video distribution
Universal remotes
Home theatre
Appliance control
Spa control
Sensors
Remote access

These are the nine areas I will be writing about and then will conclude with stories on project management and changes and upgrades. I don't mean to imply by the outline that I have all the answers on the topics. My intent is to share what I have learned in hope that it will be useful to others.

It is also important to think about what is not part of the scope of your home automation endeavors. One example that we decided to exclude is irrigation. The Irritrol Total Control system has four independent programs which offer concurrent operation seven days per week or only odd days or even days. It is totally reliable and totally flexible. It is tied to a roof sensor so it doesn't irrigate when it is raining. In other words, it does everything you could imagine and it is really easy to use. Why would anyone want to automate something that is automated? There actually are some examples that I will explain in the security and spa control areas but for something as self-contained as an irrigation system there is really nothing to be gained by tying the irrigation sub-system into an overall system.

You actually can tie an Irritrol system to your PC and do the control from there. Unfortunately, most sub-systems that are "PC Controlled" require Windows. One of the decisions I made as part of my scope was not to use Windows. Have you ever had to re-boot your PC? Would you like to re-boot your house? Me neither. If you decide to go with a Windows approach I highly recommend using a dedicated system. It doesn't have to be the latest or greatest and does not require a big video display. For less than $500 you can get a PC and put it in the basement or out of the way.

The other area that we excluded from the overall system is digital door locks. I investigated this quite a bit and found some interesting technology, including fingerprint activated locks. There are advantages to having a system know when a door was opened or closed but that can be accomplished in other ways that I will describe when we get to "sensors". Bottom line, based on the technology available and the appearance of the locks, I decided that getting into the house should not be dependent on a central system, no matter how reliable it is. We chose the Weiser Powerbolt Digital locks for all the doors.

Not sure how long it is going to take me to write the remaining dozen or so stories and there will likely be other topics and stories interspersed. Stay tuned.

Home Automation January 26, 2007 10:07 PM

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Home Automation

Home automation has been one of my hobbies for more than twenty-five years. In the early days it was mostly lighting control using X10 technology. There was a PC program written by a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center that calculated the precise time of the daily sunset and at that time signal went across the electrical wiring of the house and turned on some exterior lighting. At midnight the lights would turn off. Since that time I have learned a lot about home automation and after Year 2000, when I began to think about e-tirement from IBM, I also started planning a new "smart home". It became home at the end of March 2002.

I have not written about my home up to this point, somewhat out of modesty but also not sure how many people are interested in home automation. I ran into Steve Hamm from BusinessWeek last April in Rome at the Business Leadership Forum and he convinced me to open up about the subject. Steve visited in September and I was confident he would write something thoughtful. There was a follow-on visit by BusinessWeek TV and Greg Clarkin. Their filming ended up on BusinessWeek Weekend (carried by ABC-TV) on the Sunday after Christmas. The story ran in the January 22, 2007 issue, pages 82-83. Here are links to the story and video.

Ultimate Wired Home: A look at a computer-controlled home
King Of His Digital Castle

Home Automation January 21, 2007 11:14 AM

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Internet Phones

Telephone Today's Wall Street Journal story, "Web Phones Go Unplugged", summed it up pretty well. There is a convergence taking place between cell phones and Internet phones. Utopia has not quite arrived but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month there was a slew of new announcements surrounding Vonage, Skype, and various new handsets. The "ideal" phone is very close.

Imagine that your "cell phone" is on your belt or in your pocket. You are at home. When you make a call, the connection goes through your DSL or Cable Modem over the Internet and through one of the VoIP providers such as Vonage. When the phone "rings", you will hear a voice saying who is calling and if you look at the phone you will see a picture of the person and the person will have a unique "ring" associated with them so you can tell just from the ring. When you get in the car with your Bluetooth headset on, you will be using the same phone that you were using in the house except that phone calls will use the cellular network. When you arrive at the airport, the phone will pick up the free WiFi service being offered and you will once again be able to use Vonage or Skype for unlimited long distance calling.

Some would argue that the environment I have described is already here. There are in fact quite a few products and services available. However, there are a few wrinkles. A seamless 911 system is not quite there. There are still some places you might be that have no reliable signal of any kind. A power failure at home can cut you off from communications if you don't have a good cellular signal or if your phone is dependent on a base station. Some telecommunications providers and airport operators are attempting to block free WiFi services. Finally, some of the devices have so many features that they are hard to adapt to for many people. In spite of the wrinkles, we are getting very close to the point where the Internet is pervasive in our lives for all forms of communications and interactions. I am sure we will see and hear much more about all this at the upcoming DEMO conference.

Other patrickWeb stories about Long Distance

Conferences, Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Mobile January 12, 2006 08:29 AM

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

CoolSentry Paging

Pager You would think by now that there would be no pagers in use - it seems like everyone has a mobile phone. In fact, traditional pagers and paging services are on the decline, but there is valuable paging bandwidth that can be used for other purposes -- like the CoolSentry program. Today, a technician from SolvIt stopped by the house and installed CoolSentry devices on the compressors of our air conditioning system.

Like many parts of America, Connecticut has an electrical distribution system that is not designed to cope with the increased demands that are placed on it from growth of business and residential needs. In the event of a surge in demand, such as during a blistering hot summer afternoon, the result can be a blackout. The CoolSentry program is designed to help prevent blackouts through better management of electrical usage. If a surge in demand occurs during the summer, the power company will use a paging signal to activate the devices attached to air conditioning compressors and turn off the compressor for 20 minutes per hour. Some power is left running to keep the compressor fan turning even though the compressor itself is not running. The result is less electrical demand in the system with little or no noticeable effect on the air conditioning. The installation technician told me that he and eight other technicians were each doing 10-15 homes per day. CoolSentry is a good example of wireless technology at work to stave off potentially very negative problems. Paging lives on even if the pagers don't!.

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Home Automation May 10, 2005 10:48 AM

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

Cable Distribution

Today was the day to get some home automation projects wrapped up. There is a lot to write about on the subject of home automation, but that will be for another day. This story is about the impact of the Internet on manufacturing and distribution. Completion of the home automation project required a very special cable -- DB9 Serial with some wiring modifications on one end and RJ-11 on the other end. The cable is not the center of the story (for those interested in details about the cable, click here). The story is about how to procure this arcane cable. I was going to go to Radio Shack, buy a blank DB9 connector and make the cable myself but when I realized how long it would take to get to the store, do the splicing, test it out, and probably do some re-work, I decided to look on the web and see if I could find the cable and get overnight delivery. (read more)

Home Automation, e-Business July 9, 2003 06:48 PM

Friday, August 23, 2002

Gadgets 'R Me

Years ago I was into hot dog cookers, pasta makers, and other bizarre gadgets which my wife has gotten rid of at garage sales! Since my first TRS-80 Microcomputer in 1977 my gadgets have mostly been electronic. Gadgets go way back to the beginning for me. As long as I can remember -- tinker toys, Lincoln logs, erector sets, chemistry sets, and ham radio. Too bad they didn't have LEGO's when I was little. (read more)

Home Automation August 23, 2002 08:43 AM