Connected Home Electronics
Cool term for something that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and working on for several years now. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but I just came across the term for this market of products a month or two ago when listening to the CTEK Angels Live podcast of the MoodSeer product. I must say I am slightly amazed that we aren’t further along in this category yet (oh yeah, we were also supposed to have interplanetary space travel at the turn of the millennium), but according to the MoodSeer presentation at the LivePitch event, this market is expected to grow by 70B between now and 2011. I also believe this market will be experiencing a large deal of growth as I think the technology is available to create products at costs that are reasonable.
My personal interest in this area has rendered itself in the form of a a PBX serving the voice (telephone) needs of my home and home office, digital music available throughout the home via a centralized music collection and the Squeezeboxes, a whole house audio distribution system via the Zon whole house audio system. Various servers for sharing my photos and video collection with family and friends, along with serving several domains, web, and email.
One idea I was thinking about around a year ago and started tinkering with was the simple idea of having something like all the clocks in your house connected to your home network (wired or wireless). The idea involves throwing a small Linux buildroot onto some cheap embedded hardware and have it display accurate time (synchronized to the atomic clock of your choice courtesy of ntp). The software would be simple, and the hardware not too complex. I even attempted to implement this using the Gumstix platform hooked up to an LCD.
The idea is that Linux+ntp would keep your clock synchronized at all times, especially when the power comes back on from a power failure, or daylight savings time goes into effect. I figured you could hook this up to the Ethernet network in your home, or probably would be a good candidate for wireless, perhaps Zigbee would be the physical layer of choice here, as 802.11 might be overkill and also expensive to implement.
Currently, my collection of Squeezeboxes serve as my rudimentary implementation of network-sycnhrnoized clocks throughout the home. I also use them to display the incoming caller ID (name and phone number) for any calls coming into the house, courtesy of a simple Asterisk AGI script I cobbled together.
I ran across Ambient Devices a month or two ago when I was playing around with the Google Calendar. They seem to be doing exactly what I described in the last couple paragraphs. Currently they have a few products, including the Weather Wizard that displays the current weather for five cities directly from accuweather.com. They also have a number of cool looking orbs that communicate information (from the Internet) through subtle changes in the color of an orb-looking device sitting on your desktop (or attached to the handle of the umbrella they sell) Pretty cool concept, and is true to their “Ambient” company name. They also sell their chipset and seems that their chipset is embedded in a LG “Weather Plus” refrigerator.
Anyhow, the Ambient Clock is what got my full attention. Not yet in physical product form, but currently a Google plugin, this concept clock connects to your Google Calendar, and not only shows you the current time synchronized to the network, but also has a unique way of displaying the time and duration of upcoming appointments for the day. The mechanical chassis design is really slick looking as well.
I only imagine that additional products that could fit the market that Ambient is targeting include things like:
- A digital rolodex that sits next to your phone (heck maybe it’s embedded in the phone) and lookup addresses and phone numbers for your contacts in a LDAP or online database of sorts
- A digital recipe manager that sits in your kitchen and is connected to your favorite online cooking site (cooking light, food network, etc…). It lets you lookup and conveniently display your favorite recipes as you prepare your meals.
- Further the clock idea by offering a network-connected alarm clock - never worry about the time resetting to power outage. Alarm wakes you up to an Internet radio station or MP3. I guess the Squeezebox does this to an extent already.
- A device that monitors and alerts you to a powder day for the skiers out there, Great surf conditions for the surfers, or open tee times at the local club for the golfers.
Ok, well a somewhat lame list of other uses, I had some more examples a while back but can’t seem to recall some of them at the moment. Plus I need to get back to studying for midterms this week.