Controlling Your Home over Your Wireless LAN

Controlling Your Home over
Your Wireless LAN
Another area of wireless activity is home control. If you got excited about
going from the six remote controls on your TV set to one universal remote
control, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. (And if you still have those six remote controls
up there, we’ve got some options for you, too.)
The problem with controlling anything remotely is having an agreed-upon protocol
between the transmitting functionality and the receiving functionality. In
the infrared (IR) space, strong agreement and standardization exists for remote
controls among all the different manufacturers, so the concept of a universal
remote control is possible for IR. (IR remotes are the standard for the majority
of home audio and video equipment.) But in the radio frequency (RF) space,
there has not been the same rallying around a particular format, thus making it
difficult to consolidate control devices except for within the same manufacturer’s
line. And then you have the issues of controlling non-entertainment
devices, such as heating and air conditioning, security systems, and so on.
Those have different requirements just from a user interface perspective.
Total Harmony with your wireless entertainment
A great idea demonstrating the power of consolidated
remote controls is found in the
Harmony Remote controls. With their Smart
State Technology capabilities, they can interface
with your A/V gear through macros. Select
Watch TV, and the remote sequentially goes
through all the motions to turn on the TV, turn on
the receiver, select the TV mode, turn on the
satellite receiver, and anything else that has to
be activated to watch the television. What’s
more, these remotes have onscreen program
guides to help you select what you want before
you even turn on
The advent of 802.11b and Bluetooth — as well as touchscreen LCDs and programmable
handheld devices — offers the opportunity to change this because,
at the least, manufacturers can agree upon the physical Transport layer of the
signal and a common operating system and platform. Now we’re starting to see
the first moves toward collapsing control over various home functions towards
a few form factors and standards. We talk about these in the next few sections.