Build your own Digital Home

James Morris | Sep 20, 2006 5:28 PM

Bring PC-based intelligence and automation to your home with this complete guide. It's cheap and easy to now have the 'Jetsons' house.

The ‘smart home’ is a regular feature in science fiction, but our real-life dwellings remain decidedly dumb. However, intelligent accommodation isn’t as distant as you might think. With a few relatively inexpensive peripherals and the help of a PC, you can automate numerous aspects of your home, help to keep the premises secure, and massively improve your enjoyment of your digital media collection.

The options for digitally enhancing your domicile are virtually endless. Everything from simple remote light switching to media streaming and video surveillance is possible. Not everything will require a fully fledged PC at its centre, but most functions are dramatically enhanced by having one.

Security is something else you can readily enhance with a few computer peripherals, including video surveillance or sensor-activated events. You could also use your surveillance to keep tabs on the kids when you’re working elsewhere in the house.

This feature will look at some of these options, going into detail to demonstrate how a system called HomeHub can give you control over your home appliances from your PC. We’ll also look at the PC-based CCTV system, which has become one of the most popular aspects of home automation.

So, if you’ve considered putting your PC at the centre of your home appliances, but have never taken the time to look at the various options open to you, read on.With the Intel Viiv platform taking Microsoft’s Media Centre Edition to a new level, the first thing you’re likely to want from your digital home is more flexible access to audiovisual content. This will revolve around a home media server. Viiv is currently only available in complete systems, but you can get Windows XP MCE 2005 on its own along with the requisite remote control from a number of resellers, provided you are purchasing approved hardware with it. Virtually any PC would do as the basis, although you’ll have to consider looks and noise if it’s destined for your lounge. Aside from using the DVD drive to play videos and rip your music into a library, you’ll probably want to record TV as well. This will require a PVR-capable TV tuner, of which there are now numerous options, although you’ll need to ensure driver compatibility if you plan to use MCE (check the manufacturer’s website).

While MCE does offer about the best remote armchair experience (or ‘10 foot interface’, as Microsoft likes to call it), it’s by no means the only option if you don’t fancy filling Microsoft’s coffers further still. There are numerous fully featured TV tuners out there, although most come with software that does require the full Windows interface for many functions. A remote able to control simple features such as immediate recording and playback will often be included, but generally you’ll need to resort to a mouse and keyboard to schedule recordings. Keep in mind that MCE doesn’t come with a built-in Electronic Program Guide (EPG), however you can still get access to this all-important feature by subscribing to IceTV.

There are a few exceptions. Leadtek’s WinFast DTV1000 T includes software that’s almost entirely operable with the supplied remote. But most other tuners will require extra software if you want to operate them from the sofa. One option is SnapStream’s Beyond TV, which has a huge range of capabilities, particularly for network media streaming and downloading recordings to portable devices. However, its built-in EPG is US and Canada only.

Alternatively, you could try CyberLink’s PowerCinema 4: it offers one of the best interfaces around, and a trial version is available too, so you can make sure that it works with your PVR card and that you like the interface.

You can add motion detection to your webcam by buying software such as Active WebCam.

Since you’ll be using your media PC as an audio jukebox and DVD player, you’ll want decent sound. However, even a premium surround PC speaker system probably won’t be up to the standard of a proper hi-fi home cinema set. If you’ve recently bought your home cinema amp, it should have digital inputs, so it’s worth ensuring your media PC has the right digital outputs to plug in, so your hi-fi amp does the digital-analog conversion instead of your PC. By sidestepping the PC’s sound card in this way, you can preserve audio quality without having to shell out for a premium sound card.

To distribute music around your home, our preferred choice is the Sonos Digital Music System. This can route your digital music collection to up to 32 rooms and is blissfully easy to set up and use. The system is made up of two parts: ZonePlayers, which act as amplifiers and need to be placed (along with speakers) in every room you want to distribute music to; and Controllers, which come in hardware and software versions, allowing you to choose tracks, no matter where they’re stored. It’s a satisfying and simple way of distributing music around your house wirelessly, but it’s also expensive, with a two-room set costing $2400.

There are lots of cheaper options, albeit not so seamlessly executed. Netgear’s MP101 costs just over $150 and uses 802.11g wireless networking to connect to the music database on your PC. Pinnacle’s ShowCenter 200 ($399 from www.computeralliance.com.au) does something similar, with the added bonus of full support for WMA files downloaded from online music stores. But you’ll need to connect either to amplified speakers or a hi-fi to hear the output – and a TV as well in the case of the ShowCenter.

You can, of course, simply share your audio collection in Windows and use another networked PC or notebook to access it, but this will hardly present
a friendly browsing interface. Instead, you could use Apple’s iTunes to manage and share your music to other PCs. All you need to do is turn on music sharing in the iTunes preferences on the PC with your music library, and install iTunes on the other computers – they should find the shared library automatically. However, iTunes can’t play WMAs directly, and instead converts these to its own AAC format. The DRM on any WMAs you bought from an online music service also means you can’t import them.

You don't need to spend hundreds to get a decent webcam.

But the digital media home gets more interesting when you expand your horizons beyond music and video, and start to look at the truly connected house – one that allows you to control appliances from your PC. The most interesting platform is HomeHub, which, aside from allowing you to share your photo and music collections to any Web-connected PC for access over the Internet, enables you to control and monitor your lighting, heating, appliances and security systems. It also offers other PC-centric benefits, such as sharing picture and music libraries with other computers on your home network.

Although most people will experiment with one or two appliances, HomeHub promises to fulfil the dream of total home automation, offering the ability to open and close curtains automatically, monitor the temperature throughout the house and even automatically water your plants while you’re away on holiday!

HomeHub is capable of using several technologies to control your home, the most popular being X10 (see The X10 factor). It can connect to the various gadgets and appliances using power cables that are already installed
in your house. The walkthrough shows you the basics of setting up the system, based on a one month free trial. After the initial trial period, subscribers will have to pay each month and receive a range of services, including email alerts from your HomeHub, 64MB of storage space on the company’s servers for security camera recordings, monthly software updates and technical support.Installing window locks and an alarm system visible to all visitors may deter opportunistic burglars, but it won’t catch the determined thief. And even if your alarm has police response, there’s a good chance your home invaders will be long gone before the cops arrive. After that, catching the culprits could be difficult, unless you have clear images of them in the act.

This is where video surveillance comes in. Although a professional, manned surveillance system will be beyond most people, you can put a useful alternative together with as little as a USB webcam. In fact, burglar Benjamin Park hit the news for being caught red-handed in this way (www.grisby.org/burglar.html.

Obviously, you can’t just leave your webcam recording video 24/7 – the storage requirements would be prohibitive. So you’ll need software capable of detecting motion. PY Software’s Active WebCam (US$29 from www.pysoft.com) can give you remote access to your PC’s webcam via the Internet over your broadband connection. But it can also upload snapshots to an FTP site when motion is detected. Digi-Watcher provides another alternative. The company’s free RemoteView simply gives you remote Internet access to your webcam. But the US$39 Watcher adds motion detection and FTP upload of recordings, plus email and telephone notification with the appropriate supporting hardware.

However, simply installing either of these apps won’t give you immediate external access to your webcam. By default, PCs on your local network are hidden from the outside world by your broadband router via Network Address Translation (NAT). This gives local PCs a local-only IP address, so the IP address the outside world sees is that of the router itself. To make your webcam externally accessible, you’ll have to head to your router’s Web management and forward the appropriate port to your PC’s local IP address. For Web-based access, the port could be either 80 or 8080, but some systems use different numbers. However, the local software should be able to upload snapshots and video via FTP without further adjustment to your router.

Unless your broadband includes a static IP address, you’ll also have to configure one more thing before you can keep an eye on the inside of your house from a Web browser anywhere in the world. Most broadband accounts allocate IP addresses dynamically, so you may only have the same one for a few days. In this case, you’ll need a dynamic DNS service. No-IP is a popular choice with a free basic service. Utilities are available for most operating systems. These tell No-IP’s servers your current broadband IP address, so you can use a URL in the form mywebsitename.no-ip.com instead of the raw numerical address. Similar services are available from www.dyndns.com and www.tzo.com. Some routers and network devices even have support for one or more of these services built in.

Although a simple webcam is the cheapest way to add video surveillance to your digital home, it has numerous drawbacks, not least of which is that you’ll have to leave your PC on all the time. If it crashes or there’s a power cut, your surveillance will go down too. A much more robust option is a network camera. Axis supplies a wide range of both wired and wireless devices.

Wireless network cameras are more flexible and for the ultimate in home-video surveillance, D-Link’s SecuriCam DCS-5300G is one of the cheapest wireless Pan/Tilt/Zoom (PTZ) cameras we’ve come across (about $800 from various resellers). As well as motion detection and FTP upload, you can control the camera through the Web interface. A built-in motor lets you point the lens across 270° horizontally and 90° vertically, so you can keep an eye on a larger area of your house. Providing external access to a network camera is very similar to a PC – you’ll need to forward the appropriate port to the camera’s local IP address using your router, and use a dynamic DNS service as described above.

The walkthrough shows you how to turn a D-Link DCS-5300G into your own automatic video sentry, although most network cameras have similar settings to enable these features. Your network camera will be able to detect intruders and upload snapshots of them via email or to a remote FTP server. So even if the thief ends up stealing your camera, the evidence will be safely stored outside your house. This won't stop a burglary but, as the case of Benjamin Park illustrates, it could help you catch the thief.Networking is central to any attempt to bring domestic life into the digital age. You now have a plethora of options for this, and you might want to mix and match more than one. The most obvious choice for short distances is wired Ethernet. Virtually any broadband router will have up to four 10/100 Ethernet ports, and the vast majority of PCs and notebooks come with built-in Ethernet. So the cheapest option is to situate this router near any desktop systems you plan to use and hook them up using standard CAT-5 networking cables.

Much more flexibility is offered by wireless networking. Broadband routers with built-in 802.11g are available for as little as $200 and adaptors for even less. However, even the nominal 54Mb/s of 802.11g can’t be relied upon for many of the functions you’ll want for your digital home. Although you can hope for up to 20Mb/s average throughput from 802.11g, this won’t necessarily mean bandwidth without the odd stutter. So streaming DivX video should work in close proximity, but you won’t be able to stream DVD-quality MPEG2 between floors. We’ve found MIMO-based routers, such as the Belkin Wireless Pre-N (see A-List), can just about manage this feat, but for a considerable premium over standard 802.11g.

Power to the people
There’s another alternative, though. There's been much talk for years about power line networking, but it never quite delivered on its promises in the past, with low speeds and proprietary technology making it an unattractive option. The HomePlug Power Alliance, however, has come together to make devices that offer similar or better performance to WLAN, with a much less complex setup. All you need to do is plug an adaptor into a nearby wall socket, then run a network cable to your PC, and likewise for your broadband router. The HomePlug 1 standard offers 14Mb/s, around the same as the true speed of standard 802.11g, although real-world performance will be less. Faster standards are planned, but existing manufacturers are already supplying kit that goes beyond this using proprietary systems.

Netcomm offers HomePlug a range of HomePlug-compatible adaptors. Top of the range is the Turbo line, which claims to be capable of 85Mb/s at up to 200m range with its own adaptors. It’s a cinch to set up. Bandwidth across a couple of floors of a house averaged around 18Mb/s, slightly better than Linksys SRX MIMO was able to achieve. A starter kit of two adaptors costs $236 from www.computeronline.com.au. This may seem like a lot, but if your desktop PCs already have LAN ports but no WLAN, it works out as comparable to wireless, and performance is clearly superior.

The X10 system also uses power lines for communication, but just for very low bandwidth control data. It can’t cope with anything like streaming media. You still might want to add it to your smart home’s repertoire for the less data-intensive applications.

Pulling your various digital home systems together isn’t just a matter of networking – software integration is key too. If you’re using MCE on your media PC, and X10 device control, you can add Embedded Automation’s mControl so MCE can talk to a CM12 X10 unit (see The X10 factor). There are also X10 plug-ins for interoperation with Homeseer applications.

Alternatively, the HomeHub system can integrate X10 control with the ability to access some popular network video cameras, over wired or wireless networks.

Smarter futures
The smart home idea is rapidly growing in importance, and the possibilities are expanding all the time. In the near future, the antiquated X10 system will be superseded by a wireless alternative called ZWave. This is a more sophisticated system and includes all-important device acknowledgement, so you know your commands have been received. Some ZWave devices are available now, but the range of options is limited. Even with current technology, there’s much you can add beyond what we’ve discussed in this feature. X10 voice activation is possible, and for the truly surveillance crazy we’ve even heard of X10 expert installing software similar to that used for the traffic congestion control. This recognises the number plates of visitors and controls gate access accordingly – even announcing the visitor by name!

The Homeseer software even has an optional RFID component. Fancy lights that turn on and off automatically as you move rooms? Need to keep track of your pets around a large house? All this is possible, and much more in your digital home. And in most cases, you don’t need to spend much to make them a reality.

Forget wireless: stream DVD-quality video between rooms via power points

The granddaddy of all home-automation standards is X10, which is now more than 30 years old. Like power line networking, this piggybacks data over domestic AC power cabling. It uses a frequency of 120kHz for transmission, sending a 1-bit signal when the AC power wave crosses zero. First, a 4-bit start code of 1110 is sent, followed by a 4-bit ‘house code’. Then comes a 4-bit function code, which can either specify a unit from one to 16 or a command, such as ‘switch on’.

With 16 house codes and 16 unit codes, up to 256 devices are supported in one system. However, you can only simultaneously control units in the same house code, so, for example, you could only turn on up to 16 lights at the same time. The maximum bandwidth of about 20 bits per second also severely limits what it can be used for – mostly just turning devices on and off or setting incremental levels. The X10 protocol is far from bullet-proof too and in some ways is showing its age. The biggest drawback is that the standard has no system for receivers to signal that they’ve actually received the control codes they’ve been sent. Electrical interference from appliances such as microwave ovens can disrupt the signal, and other devices such as monitors can absorb it. The signal can be boosted by relays, but you still can’t be absolutely certain that your X10 commands will get through as intended every time.

Despite these limitations, the range of uses for X10 is quite impressive. Receivers are available specifically for turning on lamps (LM12AU, $39), wall dimmers or powering more general appliances off and on (AM12AU, $39 – all prices from www.whome.com.au). But you can also trigger sirens, set off digitally sampled dog barks or unfurl your projector screen. Some devices can even send out X10 codes when activated by a physical event, for example, when motion is detected. This can then be used to trigger other X10 events. It’s also possible to transmit the same X10 code over RF. This allows wireless keypads, burglar alarms able to send sensor data and other remote switching devices.

Add in a PC, and you can perform quite sophisticated automation or remote control, even over the Internet. For example, HomeHub has built-in X10 control, and sophisticated X10 software such as Homeseer ($330 from www.envioustechnology.com.au) can run scripts, receive commands embedded into email messages, send email notification of X10 events even limit how long your kids can watch TV. You’ll need a PC controller such as the CM12U ($143 from www.envioustechnology.com.au) to hook X10 into your computer.

Despite its venerable status, X10 provides a wealth of home-automation options at a reasonable price, making it well worth considering as part of your own custom digital home design.

X10 units like the AM12 let you control the state of devices remotely using power lines to transmit commands

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1 Download and install the 30-day free trial of HomeHub from www.homehub.co.uk. The service will then load with your OS. Its Web interface can be accessed by clicking on the System Tray icon. You can also get to it remotely by logging into the HomeHub website – without needing to reconfigure your firewall – although this won’t allow you to set up new devices.	2 To get HomeHub talking to your X10 devices, you’ll need to install a CM12 adaptor on your PC. For the USB version, download a driver from www.letsautomate.com /download/cm12usbdriver.zip. Once this is installed, plug in the USB cable and use Device Manager to find out which COM port has been assigned. Click on Devices at the top of the HomeHub Web interface.
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3 Choose Add Manual Device on the bottom left. From the Select Device Type drop-down, choose X10 Adaptor, press the arrows icon and then again, since the CM12 is the only option in this subsection. You’ll then be able to give your adaptor a name (in our case, X10 controller) and tell HomeHub which port it’s attached to. Your HomeHub now has X10 control.	4 Next, you’ll need to set up some X10 devices for your controller to talk to. Select Add Manual Devices again. You can add appliance controllers such as the AM12, lighting controllers such as the LM12, and many other X10 units. For each one, you’ll need to configure the unique X10 Device Address corresponding to the settings on the unit itself.
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5 Using the Automation section from the main HomeHub page, you can now remotely control all of your X10 devices – even from when you are outside your home – over the Internet. Different X10 devices will have different sets of controllers. The CM12 can receive X10 signals as well as transmit them, so it can also take input from X10 motion sensors.	6 HomeHub can do a lot more than just X10, however. You can link it into the Hauppauge MVP TV adaptor, locally connected webcams and a selection of popular network security cameras. You can also import your photo and music collections for remote viewing and listening, although remote music requires the free SlimServer and Softsqueeze players and isn’t easy to set up.

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1 Plug the camera into your router with wired Ethernet. Then use the supplied utility to find your device on the network. This will scan for cameras and display them in a list. You can then configure settings such as the IP address. Once you have your camera’s IP address, you can access it via its Web utility.	2 The Configuration section of the Web interface will automatically call up the Network subsection. You can use this to connect the camera to your wireless network by entering the appropriate SSID and WEP security settings. You will then be able to disconnect your camera from the wired network and access it wirelessly.
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3 Next, define up to three motion detection areas. Choose the Motion Detection subsection. Click New to create a detection box, which you then resize to cover an area of motion. Give this an appropriate name, set the sensitivity high and percentage low, then Save the configuration and check Enable motion detection.	4 Head for the Mail & FTP subsection to set up the destination for uploaded snapshots. This can be either an email address or FTP server. Fill in the details for your ISP’s SMTP mail server, including login and password if required. Similarly, fill in the login and remote folder details for your FTP server.
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5 Select the Tools tab along the top and head for the Applications subsection. Configure a Weekly schedule for when you want motion detection to be active, or check 'All the time'. Set a Delay duration between Events and select one or more of your named motion-detection boxes. Choose ‘Upload snapshots while motion detected’ as the Trigger action and then either send by email or FTP.	6 If you want live remote video access over the Internet, you’ll need to set up the built-in support for a dynamic DNS server found in the DDNS & UPnP subsection. You’ll also have to redirect the ports used by the D-Link to its IP address on your broadband router. By default, these are 80, 5001, 5002 and 5003, although they can be changed in the D-Link’s Network subsection.

This article appeared in the October, 2006 issue of PC Authority.