The Digital Home on a shoestring

It was interesting to read Jeremy Toeman's thoughts on what a Digital Home should look like - as a fellow geek it's something I've been looking at over the last few years - both professionally (we have been asked a number of times to think about the evolution of the Digital Home for various people) but also at my and friends' homes. However, a few years ago, inspired by a visit to BBC R&D labs where I saw an entire home automation suite operating on a WiFi enabled PS2, I have become more interested in low budget retrofitting into existing environments rather than buying high cost point-use commercial gear.

The first thing is to ensure ubiquitous connectivity - in general, open cabling is a source of domestic strife so is best avoided - but running cables through walls etc, unless done at the build phase or in a gutting operation, never returns its investment*. I have found that modern (last 2-3 years) WiFi covers a fairly large turf space - certainly big enough for most family houses, except those with extremely thick stone walls - in that case (a friend's house) we tried running a single cable and an expansion box (easy but aesthetically objected to), a second WiFi router (simple but non trivial to get all the computers to be on the same network reliably) and mains electric systems (works if everything is on the same circuit) which worked best in my friend's case.

The next thing I built was the "MyPCTV" rig - essentially using an older PC as a media fileserver (See picture below with system hooked into Laptop). Key is to have a TV with a VGA input, solves lots of connectivity problems. I took the sound output into my HiFi amp (Creek) and then used a Hafler circuit to generate analog surround sound (price - a few pennies for more wire). If you have 2 decent floorstanding hi-fi speakers as the front system you don't need a sub-woofer, nor a central speaker system - they will do all that work for you easily and at considerably better sound quality. (I use Rega floorstanders, I find they are great entry level "quality" Hi Fi manufacturers - my shelfstanders are Tannoy and Rega). The only problem with using this quality of sound output is it exposes the poor quality of low resolution MP3 files, but thats another story



The next step is to get music (and pictures) wherever you are. The best way to do this is to have a PC serve as a conduit for a fileserver (or be one itself), and connect to a separate music output system in each room (mine vary from hifi amp & speakers to on-board PC soundcard and speakers). If you are like us, with kids and a bunch of older computers and sound systems, you will find that you have as many machines as rooms wanting music, so I set up a PC in every room, with varying quality of speaker systems integrated (I don't like roof speakers by the way - the sound is not as good as eye level/floorstanding speakers, and you can't adjust positioning to get optimal acoustics). The key is to upgrade the old computers to run Windows XP (we're not a Mac shop) as the networking is far simpler and more reliable - ie as much RAM as you can stuff into them. They don't have to go that fast, as they are mainly used as media servers and for email / web access.

My original architecture had one PC as a music fileserver (another one fdoes photos), but over time as disk storage has got cheaper and cheaper I have tended to reproduce my music on multiple computers' disks in the house. What is increasingly happening is that the iPod owning members of the family also want to play their music, and its far easier just to allow them to connect into the music system directly than try and integrate it into the central network. This architecture also allows me to connect in older music devices such as my old Discman very easily, and in one room I have set up a simple mixer so the musicians in the family can hook in their (and their friends') guitars, keyboards, microphones etc. (Watching my family, I think this flexible approach to roaming music storage devices will be the endgame, not a fixed system like Sonos - you bring your mobile music server device into a room / space, hook it in, and it plays your music).

WiFi in my experience copes with picture and audio files fine (all the computers in the house, and the TV, access our central photo file as a screen saver). Where WiFi does break down periodically, in my experience, is for realtime video transport between computers, so I have found that having the machine operating the TV output needs to be cabled to the router to work reliably.

We've also recently bought an XBox 360 and we have started to dabble with that to see what can be done - and because the architecture is so flexible, it's been very easy to hook it in and start to play with it....

Jeremy talks about other home automation too:

- Central Vacuum. We thought this would be great, but after a little digging in, seems like they are consistently underpowered poorly designed products. Pass.
- Video Intercom Front Door System. The day I move into my 15,000 square foot mansion I’ll consider it, but until then, I can run down the stairs to see who’s there. Plus I’m going to try to jury-rig something myself with a Bug Labs setup.

We rented a house once with central vacuuming, it was a pain in the *rse. Modern portable vacuums are far more powerful, lightweight and flexible.

I have dabbled with various bits of home automation (lights, curtains etc), but to date the complexity and unreliability gives a poor ROI - I'm awaiting the explosion in m2m devices with some interest therefore, as this will enable a whole new set of Digital Home applications. (I aldso have half an eye on recruiting Lego Mindstorms into this task...). My only current project in this space is to allow the security camera server to stream onto the network so their pictures too can be accessed from any PC - so I can see who is at the front door from the top or back of the house.

What I am now getting interested in is "Green" management of the house, as (i) it has real ROI - reducing fuel bills (lighting is noise in this scheme of things, its heating/cooling and local power generation you want to manage), and (ii) its soo zeitgeisty . This is exacerbated as we live in London, where a lot of the housing stock (including ours) is 70 years old or more, and so dreadfully energy inefficient - but the ROI of any form of insulation (except roofing) is laughable unless you are building or gutting a building. Looking at the economics of retrofitting, I suspect the better approach is to self-generate more onsite power to help drive the heating and cooling, and use it as efficiently as possible.

I'd be fascinated to hear of others' retrofit projects - I do think that mobile/ modular / interoperable is the more achievable approach for most households than large centralised systems, and it is far more flexible than centralised systems - I and friends of mine have rented houses with these systems in the past, and we have all found this approach inflexible to adapting to changing usage and new technology (there is nothing more laughable - and frustrating - than a 5 year old centrally fitted home entertainment system, I find).

*I think the most pragmatic architecture is what mine has worked out to be - a "small world" network where a the longer, the highest bandwidth, or most secure links, (eg to the "banking computer") are on cable and everything else is on WiFi