Geez i dont know how to present this question.
Oh well…anyway I was watching a show a while ago about one of those houses controlled by computers…where everything is connected to the internet(the tv the microwave the smoke alarms etc.) anyway my question is (in the first draft of these houses where like computers the internet gets slow sometimes) would everything slow down if you were downloading something? (ie: your downloading an mp3 and trying to uh get a recipe on your microwave)
would everything thats connected to the house get slowed down because of what youre doing?
I would think that running the house was done on local equipment. If something had to wait on into from the 'net it would be slow, but otherwise it would not. Turning the heat on or off, or determining if a room was occupied would not be affected by the net.
Interesting question. My guess is that the house would have a really simple priority scheduler. Basically everything inside the house would take precidence over anything on the outside. I’ve never seen the specs for a house like that, but the internal structures are almnost certainly on an isolated network, which would be connect to the internet at only one point. I doubt you could ever notice your download getting interupted, because how much does a microwave really have to talk about? A packet of data could comunicate nearly everything it would need to recieve or send(temp, time setting, error status., Then the download would startup again.
I remember the first one I saw, I think that it was featured on BoB Villas program, called a “smart house.” Anyway the new owners found one bug after another in it & soon called it a ‘dumb house’…they tried to sue Bob about it too but he claimed that they did not maintain it well enuff.
IMHO, downloading something and keeping the house running would be using two different types of memory.
Plus why would a house want to download an MP3? Houses don’t dance, unless this was not only a “smart house” but a “hip, cool, jiving, dancing house” . . .
It probably wouldn’t … but, as soon as Internet-enabled refrigerators are available, there’ll be referigrator porn for them to download.
At its basic level, a ‘smart house’ is simply a house that has enough wiring to allow various components to be connected together through computer hardware. For instance, in a typical house construction now, the phone lines are all ‘daisy chained’ together. In a smart house design, you run a separate cable from every phone jack back to a terminating area, usually in the basement. Then you can connect them all to a PBX or a computer, and computer-control all the phones. You usually run a separate CAT-5 cable to each room (or maybe two), and terminate them in the same place. THen you can connect a network hub up to it and have an available internet connection in each room.
From there, it gets more complex. Many of these houses have ‘zone heating’ with two separate furnaces (or maybe under-floor water heating), and a computer controlled thermostat system. This allows you to keep the temperature more constant. In a house with just one furnace, you often can only get the temperature right in one part of the house. i.e. if you set the thermostat so the main floor is nice and warm, the upstairs will be too hot and the basement too cold.
Then there’s audio. Run speaker cables to each room, terminate them in the machine room, and hook up a multi-zone audio system. Put an infra-red sensor in each room, and you can use a universal remote to turn on audio in each room, and have separate sources for each room. Or, you can get fancy and buy some very expensive touch screens.
For the video system, you take all your TV cables and connect them to a multi-zone box that allows you to play any VCR or DVD player and pipe the output to any room in the house. You can also connect your DSS satellite to the main controller and allow multiple TV’s to watch it.
If you have security cameras, you feed their output to the video distribution system. So if you’re watching TV and the doorbell rings, you hit a button on your remote and the security camera image appears on your TV.
Then there’s lighting, draperies, and all kinds of other things you can automate. Once it’s all computer controlled, you can make things happen with a touch of a button. For instance, if you are in your home theater room and press ‘watch a movie’ on your touchscreen, the system turns off all the lights in the house, turns on the TV and video projector, closes the drapes, etc. Have to go to the bathroom? Press a button, and the lights come up, the DVD player pauses, and the lights turn on on a path to the bathroom.
When you’re ready for bed, go to your bedroom and press the ‘sleep’ button. All the lights go off in the house, the security system actives, all draperies close, the zone heating turns the temperate way down in the lower levels and slightly down on the bedroom level, etc.
Add a remote DTMF phone interface, and you can phone your house from your cell phone and have it start the oven, turn up the heat, and turn on the lights before you get home. Connect a garage door opener interface, and the lights in the house go on whenever you open your garage door, so you never have to fumble your way into a dark home.
A lot of this stuff is pretty gimmicky, but some has real benefits. Zone heating can save 30% on your energy costs. Multi-room audio and intercom can really improve your quality of life. I’ve built multi-room audio into my house, and it’s really nice to be able to sit into my office and listen to a CD from my stereo (I have in-wall speakers in several rooms). If we build another house, it’ll definitely be designed with zone heating, and I intend to go absolutely bananas with the wiring. It’s trivially easy and inexpensive to wire a home whle it’s under construction, but as I found out you can really regret it later if you need a computer connection in a room and don’t have one.