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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.If you stop the average person on the street and start talking about home networks, he or she would probably make references to ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX, or mention the Home Shopping Network or some other cable network show. Network, until recently, has meant little else to most people. “But times, they are a changin’.” The invasion of telecommunications into all aspects of life is creating a different meaning of the word network. Most people have had some contact with a network through their work environment — computer local area networks (LANs) in the office, control networks in factories, telephone networks in many mid-sized or larger businesses . . . heck, the Internet is a huge network. You can think of networks simply as things that help you do your work. As you concentrate on printing a document, calling up a database, or checking out the price of a product online, the network is invisible (that is, until it’s broken). The network concept has begun to move from the workplace to the home, and smart home builders and remodelers (and forward-looking owners of otherwise perfect existing homes) are starting to think in terms of wiring (or wirelessing) their homes both to make use of a network today and to futureproof against upcoming requirements. Before you go any further, do this little exercise (don’t worry, we won’t grade you): Write down all the things in your house that you think you may want to network. Be as creative as you can. Think about your lifestyle and the way your house is set up. When you finish, put the list aside and continue to read this chapter. Toward the end, we’ll share our list with you.
Living in Your Smart HomeYour smart home can seep into all aspects of your life. It helps you do those day-to-day tasks that can take up so much time, such as opening the draperies, dimming the lights, and flipping on the Weather Channel to see whether the kids have a snow day. How far you go with your smart home depends on your lifestyle, budget, and tastes. This section spends a virtual day in a fictitious smart home. Here’s the scenario: You, the reader, are part of a family of six, plus the requisite pets (we prefer dogs). You and your spouse both work, and the kids range in age from 8 to 17.
Starting your dayAnyone with kids knows the importance of keeping on a schedule. Your home network helps you do just that, in style. At first light, you wake to your home-controlled alarm — a stream of pleasant classical music coming over your home-audio network into your bedroom. After a preset length of time, the music fades out and the TV kicks on to your favorite local station, where you can get the weather and traffic reports and information about any school closings or delays. Down the hall, the kids awaken to the music of their choice. In the kitchen, the coffeemaker starts brewing your morning caffeine requirements. Select shades and drapes throughout the house open to let the day’s light stream in. It’s winter, so the towel warmers and the radiant heat in the bathrooms’ floors are turned on. The automatic pet door out back opens and lets the dog out for his morning constitutional. By this time, you’re already in the kitchen making school lunches. Being the nice person you are, you take a cup of coffee to your spouse, who is listening to National Public Radio in the bathroom. As you finish setting out breakfast for the kids, a glance at the upstairs monitors shows that two of your four kids are still in bed. Your eldest son is videoconferencing with his girlfriend on his computer. You punch the intercom and tell them all to get a move on.
As the children cycle into and out of the bathroom, the home-control system times their showers to make sure no one hogs the bathroom. The shower’s water temperature is just to their liking, but that’s hardly a surprise — it’s the same setting they use each day this time of year. As you sit down to breakfast, your spouse comes running through, late for the office. A printout of major headlines and personal stock standings sits waiting in the printer, having been created and downloaded from the Internet overnight. Your spouse works down the street (we did tell you that you work at home, didn’t we?), and your smart home knows that you both like a warm car when you get into a 15-degree garage, so the home controller starts the car 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time. Before your spouse climbs inside the toasty car, the home-control system gives a verbal reminder to put the bottles and cans next to the curb because today is recycling day. As your spouse leaves the garage, your home-control system talks to your phone system and redirects all of your spouse’s home-business line calls to the car phone. Once at work, a simple push of a speed dial button on the office phone dials in and redirects the calls again to your spouse’s office. Back at home, you confirm that the kids caught the bus by using the video monitor in the kitchen, and then you get ready for work. You ask the home controller to put the house in your personal mode — in terms of temperature, music, lighting, drape settings, and anything else you may have set.
Getting down to workYou get a second cup of coffee and decide to work for a while in the sunroom. You tell the home controller where you are, and the controller transfers all your business calls to the extension near the table. Your laptop is wirelessly connected to your server and the Internet. You check your various e-mail accounts and voice mail and make a few conference calls on the multiline home-telephone system. While you’re on one phone call, you turn on the TV to access the local online directory and navigate to the ordering page for that posh take-out shop down the street. Twenty minutes later, the delivery person arrives at the front door; you take your wireless two-line headset phone — conference call and all — to the door, where you tip the delivery person (you paid over the TV set) and retreat back to the sunroom for lunch. For a mid-afternoon break, you head for the exercise room to work off some of that lunch. When you enter, you announce yourself to your voice-activated home-automation system, and it automatically sets the music and other environmental settings to your previously defined preferences. You sit down at your rowing machine, which has a large monitor that shows real-life settings of popular rowing locales.
Halfway through your workout session, a delivery person shows up at your door. An announcement that someone is at the door interrupts the music, and the nearest video display shows a picture of who it is. You don’t want to stop mid-workout, so you reply that you are busy and ask him to leave the package inside the door. You prompt for the control system to unlock the front door, and watch as the front door unlocks itself and the delivery person places the packages in the foyer. He leaves, and you start rowing again along Boston’s Charles River. It’s your turn for a temperature-controlled shower, where you listen to CNN from the TV set, via moisture-resistant speakers mounted in the bath. Squeaky clean, you go back to work. At 3:00, you have your first videoconference of the day from your office downstairs. While in the basement, you call up your home-control system and start the roast cooking in the oven. The kids drift home in the afternoon and spread out across the house. While you access your corporation’s data network, your kids take advantage of the computers. The youngest kids — twins — play multiplayer games on the home’s high-speed Internet connection. Your eldest daughter logs onto the school’s educational network to do research for the midterm paper due next week. And your son, when home from football practice, logs onto his school’s network to collaboratively work with three others on a joint presentation for the next day. Instant messages, e-mails, and file transfers all flow with ease. The home controller’s voice enunciator reminds you that the roast should be done by now, and you head upstairs.
Dinner timeMeanwhile, at work, your spouse glances at the clock and remembers in a panic that the family needs groceries. A quick dial into the home LAN yields the grocery list on the computerized message board in the kitchen. On the way home, a phone call into the home controller redirects calls back to the car phone in case someone tries to call. The magnetic driveway sensor tells the home-control system to announce your spouse’s arrival. As your spouse enters the house from the garage, the home controller again redirects all calls to the home office, completing the day’s cycle. As your spouse brings the groceries into the kitchen, you receive a kiss (sorry, not automated). Ready to eat, you ask the home controller to set dinner mode in the dining room. A microphone in the light switch hears the command and dims the lights and turns on the gas-driven fireplace. The home-control system selects some family-oriented music from the MP3 server and plays it over the in-wall speakers in the dining room. After dinner, you start cleaning up as your kids race to their rooms to finish their homework. Later, they watch a TV special in the living room, while you take in an old Spencer Tracy movie in your bedroom. In the meantime, your spouse has a late videoconference in the home office downstairs with clients in Japan. Occasionally, you access the picture-in-picture (PIP) capability on your TV set to check around the house, making sure that no one is getting into any trouble. After the movie, you give a simple command to the home controller and the lights are dimmed, the temperature in select zones is lowered, shades and draperies close, nightlights come on, and the intercom goes into monitor mode for the youngest kids, in case they’re sick during the night. (The sound from those monitors plays only in the master bedroom area.)
Peace at last!With the kids asleep for the night, you decide to take a nice relaxing bath. You instruct your home-control system to prepare the bathroom — dim the lights, open the skylight, run the bath at your favorite temperature, turn off the telephone extensions nearby (route them to voice mail instead), and play your favorite album on the bathroom speakers. While lounging in bed watching the wide-screen TV, your spouse tells the home-entertainment system’s PVR (personal video recorder, a hard-drivebased system that can record video digitally) to search the shows it has been archiving every day and play the most recent Enterprise! episode. Your house is in off-hours mode. The dog is inside, and the doggy door is secure. All phones have muted ringing volumes; some don’t ring at all. All drapes are closed. The temperature is lower to save energy when your family is tucked in tight under the covers. All security systems are now alert, looking for movement outside the house. After your bath, you climb in bed and read for a while. You finish your electronic book and decide you want to read the sequel right away. You surf the Web from your TV set, find the book, buy it, download it to the home LAN and thus to your electronic book via a wireless connection. Your dishwasher kicks on at midnight when the rates are low (you loaded it at dinnertime and turned it on, but the home controller activates it when rates drop). All night long, your home controller and its various sensors keep an eye on everything for you. You sleep peacefully.
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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.