Huge news! By the end of 2008 “X” will be available and built into almost every electrical device!\u00a0 Your home cinema AV amplifier will come with X.<\/p>\n
It will ramp down the volume when the doorbell or phone rings, and its on-screen display will superimpose the phone callers details or live video from the front door X enabled wireless CCTV camera.\u00a0 Of course every new display device you buy from now on will have the same abilities built in.\u00a0 So whether you are near the digital photo frame in the kitchen, or the new flat screen TV in the bedroom, you’ll see the same information instantly displayed.<\/p>\n
You’ll walk into your local electrical retailer and look at the washing machines.\u00a0 The cheapest ones will have limited X, perhaps the ability just to send an X packet when it’s finished a load.\u00a0 Other machines will have top of the range X features.\u00a0 They’ll be able to report the time they started, the estimated time of completion.\u00a0 They’ll let any other X enabled device know the instant they have finished and you’ll be able to query them on how many loads they’ve done this month and how much electricity they used.\u00a0 They’ll even send you an email to warn when their parameters are outside of normal and you may need a visit from an engineer.<\/p>\n
Sonos<\/strong> and others will launch their X enabled firmware.\u00a0 Suddenly your house has a voice.\u00a0 Now the washing machine can announce it’s finished and ready for the next load in all the rooms you choose.\u00a0 Need a reminder to put the bins out each week?\u00a0 X will make the announcement in the zones you require at the day and time of your choice.\u00a0 The AV amp will use its OSD to show a brief message too.\u00a0 A simple press of a button on your remote, your mobile phone or any of a number of devices around the home will stop the bin reminder playing again after the pre-programmed 30 min “snooze” time.<\/p>\n Like all other X enabled devices the washing machin<\/strong>e will use TCP\/IP to communicate.\u00a0 As every electrical device in the home now has an IP address and they can communicate directly with one another. You can expand your X setup with an inexpensive USB device and software package that will provide even more intelligence to your system, whilst providing a web interface to monitor and control everything from anywhere on the planet.\u00a0 However, the appliances will always retain the ability to talk directly to one another, should the central controller go off-line.<\/p>\n Your security system will be X enabled too and so the house can make many other decisions based on safety, as well as security.\u00a0 If the smoke detector<\/strong> trips at night while the house is occupied, X will enable the security panel to talk to the lights and the phones.\u00a0 Turning all the lights on and ringing all internal telephones will waken everyone in double quick time.\u00a0 Of course if the house is unoccupied X’s integration with the internet and phone system will produce a flurry of email, SMS and voice messages to make sure you get the news as soon as possible, along with your neighbour perhaps.<\/p>\n As the HVAC<\/strong> controller also talks X, the simple action of arming the security system is enough to have the heating system drop a couple of degrees as it gets the message that the house is no longer occupied.\u00a0 Many other similar simple routines will be triggered without a second thought from you, allowing your home to better manage use of utilities, reduce its own carbon footprint.<\/p>\n X will of course integrate with older systems like X10 with X Gateways.\u00a0 But the true power of X will be best served with two-way systems like Z-Wave<\/strong> that have status reporting.\u00a0 The open source community will have a great involvement.\u00a0 Anyone can write applications for X as it is an open standard.<\/p>\n So what what is X and will it really be available in 2008?\u00a0 Well, so far X is just in my imagination.\u00a0 X is my utopia.\u00a0 Most of the scenarios above are achievable now, but only with a huge amount of work and a geek to ensure the many stages of translation between each sub-system’s disparate “language” are achieved.<\/p>\n After 10 years of writing about the “smart” home, isn’t it time the hardware manufacturers and software companies got together and sorted this whole integration standards thing out?\u00a0 We’re more than a decade into the widespread use of the internet.\u00a0 IP is the standard.\u00a0 Wifi is built into everything from watches to games consoles.\u00a0 There’s more computing power in my phone that on the Apollo rocket that first landed on the moon.\u00a0 Surely it’s not beyond the capability of man in the 21st century to sort out this mess.\u00a0 Isn’t it time your washing machine could talk “X”.<\/p>\n