Dummies, Wireless

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
See me, feel me, hear me, touch me
Cool new handheld devices — namely, Web tablets and stand-alone touchscreens,
are sporting IR interfaces and can become remotes for your whole
home. (Whole home means that you can use it anywhere that your wireless
net reaches for a broad range of devices anywhere in your home; check out
Chapter 1 for more details about whole-home networks.)
You’re probably familiar with touchscreens if you’ve ever used a kiosk in a
mall to find a store or in a hotel to find a restaurant. Touch panels are smaller
(typically 6- to 10-inch screens) and are wall mounted or simply lie on a table;
you touch the screen to accomplish certain tasks.
Touch panels have become a centerpiece for expensive home control installations.
They allow you to turn the air conditioning on and off, set the alarm,
turn off the lights, select music, change channels on the TV — and the list
goes on. These are merely user interfaces into often PC-driven functionality
that can control almost anything in your house — even the coffee maker.
Crestron (www.crestron.com) rules the upper end of touch-panel options
with an entire product line for home control that includes wireless-enabled
touch panels. The Crestron color touch panel systems are to die for (or at
least to second-mortgage for). We would say, “The only thing these touch
panels cannot do is let the dog out on cold nights,” but if we said it, someone
would retort, “Well, actually, they can.”
Crestron’s Isys i/O WiFi, TPMC-8x is a modified tablet-style PC with an 8.4inch
screen. This product runs a specially modified version of Windows and
communicates using 802.11b/g/a. With this device, you can control your
home theater and home automation system, turn on lights, and basically
control anything in an automated house. You can also listen to music files
and view streaming video directly on the tablet itself!
Crestron is definitely high end: The average installation tops $50,000. But if
you’re installing a home theater, a wireless computing network, a slew of A/V,
and home automation on top of that, you probably will talk to Crestron at
some point.
A popular, lower-cost alternative to Crestron is Control4 (www.control4.
com). Control4 makes a line of home entertainment, control, and automation
devices, ranging from home controllers that can centrally control all the
devices in a home, home theater controllers, which centralize control of your
home theater components, whole-home audio distribution systems, and
ZigBee lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning)
controllers.
Control4 uses widely adopted standards such as Ethernet, 802.11, and ZigBee
to keep its prices down while still offering the kind of space-age automation