Bright and shiny future
I often wonder where technology in general went wrong and why it hasn’t progressed in a lot of areas, while it has progressed incredibly much in other areas. Right now we can have dirt-cheap computers in a ridiculously small size package, hook them up to all manner of impressive sensors and do a great number of things that would benefit our lives. I simply refuse to believe that I’m the only one who sees the possibilities of what is readily available on the market right now, there are just too many smart people out there who know things far better than I do.
This is a matter that has interested me for some time and I can imagine it will continue to fascinate me as I see no change in the near future. Granted, there could be hundreds, possibly thousands, of people all over the world working on just what I want to have and see available on the market, but I just don’t know about it.
Home automation
A computer that does the job right, communicates with other computers around the house, controlled by a central device that you can interface with if necessary, but most likely won’t since the system will just take care of business more often than not. Imagine, if you will, a very small yet capable computer running optimized code and applications written for the task at hand with sensors for heat, light and what have you.
The raspberry PI proves that it can be done and for a very modest and reasonable fee per unit. A small computer that doesn’t eat much power to do its job, small enough to put nearly anywhere and easy to wire up for nearly anyone. Heck, add in some fairly standard connectors for ZIF-connection of sensors and anyone who can make sense of some basic instructions could do it. Why are there not a large variety of these devices on the market by a myriad of different manufacturers, all interfacing perfectly with each other, leaving us beings of flesh and blood to do other things than tend over ventilation, heating, power distribution and so on and so forth?
Extend it a little bit and you can really control your house from a distance, or at the very least check up on how things are at home. Have the automation system and the alarm system connected for instant notification about any abnormality when you are away from home, should you choose to have that function active. What we can do these days is really amazingly limitless and utterly impressive, when you consider the simple building blocks we have to start constructing this theoretical system with.
Home .net
Let the house serve as the true digital back-bone of your life and have the family calendar, work calendar and whatever other calendar you might need synced with “home”, in more way than one. Build the interface around something universal, like HTML5 and CSS, and you can get access to everything from nearly any device that can access the network in one way or another.
No more need for huge honking servers that most people don’t want to have around anyway, it’s all built into the house! If you need something, just hook it up to the network and tell the computer what you would want it to use the device for. Like for instance, if you were to buy a really big external hard drive and want to share it between all your devices at home, you just connect it to the right port and then hop into the interface for control on your favorite device, configure it up for the task and start using it. This isn’t sci-fi, but perfectly realistic, if the right pieces are just put into place and the software gets the right kind of user interface.
“Learning” computers
By having the right sensors in place and by giving the computer some instructions, you could make going to work in the morning a breeze. Set the alarm on your smartphone, which talks to the Home computer. Home knows by observation that you like to have coffee and toast before you go to work, checks the weather forecast and schedules the pre-heating of your car to begin at an appropriate time depending on the current temperature outside. All information taken from sensors and a simple Internet connection.
When your alarm sounds coffee is already dripping down and your toast is warming up as you put on your slippers. By the time you are standing in the kitchen and reaching for a mug to drink your coffee out of, the Home computer has realized it’s two degrees colder outside and starts pre-heating the car 3 minutes earlier than previously scheduled to compensate.
While a lot of newer devices do indeed “think” a bit for themselves or can be set up to start performing an action at a given time, they are isolated islands that communicate with no other device. If you change your alarm time because the boss called you either late at night or really early in the morning, none of the other things would change, only your alarm. If all the devices communicated, the central computer could adjust them to harmonize with your new alarm time and thus be more optimized for the change in events. A simple, but not unthinkable scenario.
Security
There are of course a ton of issues in the world of security if we let computers do the things I have mentioned above, so security must be the top priority when the software is designed. If someone, for whatever reason, were to infiltrate your Home computer there are just far too many aspects of your life that could me throughly messed up, in more ways than one. As long as there is a security barrier, someone, somewhere, will always try to break that barrier. That is just how we humans work and there is no escaping it, at least not as far as I’m aware.
As usual, I believe it’s a matter of achieving “good enough” where it’s so unlikely that someone will actually compromise your system due to the time it would take or the pure brutal computing power necessary to do so. I still feel the benefits would far outweigh the potential risks, assuming that the whole system would be built to last, designed to be used by humans and preferable made in a modular fashion. Easy to swap out a module for a new one, should the need arise or just an upgrade that improves capabilities or overall performance.
Closing thoughts
I’m very surprised over what we haven’t done with computers, given how ubiquitous they now are in terms of pricing and size as well as capability. The dreamt of “smarthouse” could be reality in a matter of hours if you had all the gear ready for installation. The real key is not in the hardware and the total costs of a system like this, but rather in getting the software ready and finished. I’m sure clever people have already built this and effectively beta tested it for a long time, but I think it’s high time for the general market to get a taste of the possibilities too.
And this is just me musing around the very narrow topic of putting a bunch of small, cheap computers around the house, hooked up to some equally cheap sensors. Where can you imagine small computers going in order to make life easier, more optimized and just plain better?
