Motivational speakers often say that we only use 10% of our brains, and of course they are all utterly wrong, because motivational speakers are qualified for nothing but turning up at conferences and shouting “Woo! Yeah!” at perplexed and embarrassed delegates. The truth is that we use all of our brain because neurons are metabolically expensive, and would not be there unless they were absolutely necessary to produce human behaviour. On the other hand computers are now cheap, and if we examine the computing power at our disposal, I think most of us would agree that we do not begin to approach using our computers to their full potential. For far too long the PC has been to many little more than a box which sits in a corner of your house, turned on when you feel the urge to write a letter or look at amusing kitten videos.
Even more scurrilous than that is the fact that many computers are rarely turned off properly at all. So if you are going to leave your PC on, you may as well make it work for you, and save energy at the same time. My crystal ball tells me that home automation is going to be a big deal this year, as some nifty new products are arriving, along with the software to link it all together.
If we extend the biological metaphor, you could consider your house to be a very big organism. It has organs which serve particular functions, such as washing dishes, lighting rooms and keeping the place at the correct temperature. It also has a brain -- your PC. The next logical step to improve on this situation is surely to introduce a nervous system which links everything together, co-ordinating the action of all the organs in order to maximise efficiency. The great news is that the nervous system already exists, in part, in the form of the wiring system of your house. X10 devices, which communicate over the this system have been around for a long time, but they have always slightly suffered in terms of reliability (you could perhaps achieve a 95% success rate).
Insteon
The new kid in town in this area is Insteon, who are soon to release their line of gadgets in Europe. While Insteon is compatible with X10, it also improves upon it by having devices that repeat signals over the network, and in addition replicate them wirelessly. This results in much improved reliability. To introduce Insteon to your home, you can start with a system that just controls the lighting. This would require a control device, an access point (which transmits instructions from the control device across the network) and some lamp dimmer modules. The modularity of the system makes it highly flexible, so you can choose the level of automation you require, or expand it gradually. No wiring is required, although you do have the option of introducing some very space-age dimmer switches and built in power points if you desire.
Insteon is not limited to lighting either: There are modules for thermostats, air conditioning, security and even lawn sprinklers. It remains to be seen how much of the range Insteon end up releasing here in Europe, but here’s hoping that they give us the lot.
Sensors and sensibility
The story doesn’t just end there. Products such as Insteon enable the centralised control of electrical systems in your house, but this still depends on a human being flicking the switch at one end in order for something to happen. Just think how many stereotypical actions you perform every day. If it’s night time, you need the light on in your bathroom when you go in, and you will need it on until you’re finished. If someone rings you’re doorbell, you need to check who’s there, and then let them in. When you wake up in the morning in winter, you need your lights on. You get the idea -- the list of possibilities are endless, and this is where your trusty PC comes in.
There are some proprietary packages which are starting to enable this sort of behaviour in your house, but by far and away the most exciting one that I have found is vCrib, which is the brainchild of the affable Vaughn Rupp. What’s more, it’s free. vCrib is Vaughn’s project to systematize a house -- to give it a personality. To achieve this, vCrib requires sensors. These sensors can be of almost any nature (pressure, light, humidity, movement to name but a few), and the only stipulation is that they are compatible with the receiver devices vCrib can communicate with -- the W800RF Receiver, and the Phidgets Interface Kit 8/8/8. At the time of writing, I can only confirm that the W800RF Receiver is available on this side of the pond.
Furthermore, Vaughn has introduced speech recognition to vCrib, so you can now pretend to be Captain Jean-Luc Picard. The speech synthesis allows vCrib to communicate back to you (targeted to the particular room you are in of course). It is hard to communicate the coolness of this system without showing it, so here you go, from the man himself:
As Vaughn points out with great perspicacity, the most surprising thing is that we do not all have this in our homes already. The technology is there, and it’s not just for the inner geek either: It makes a great deal of sense to maximise your efforts in saving energy, and making your house secure. I for one do not subscribe to the notion that labour-saving devices will turn us into lazy slobs -- on the contrary I believe that they empower us. This, my friends, is what home computers are for. And as Picard himself would say, make it so!
