If I wanted to make a complete IP based house today, what pieces of the puzzle are missing? I've tried to make a list, please add to it or link to a solution if you know of it.
Media Servers and DVRs are all there, but some of the small pieces that make it a system are hard to find or non existant.
I would love to see to following:
1) A range of basic wall switches to multi-button keypads with ethernet jacks. All it does is sends a packet to a predefined address to say "button 1 has been pressed".
2) In wall touch panels. There are full blown PCs with a touch panel that can be in-wall mounted, but in order to keep cost down, and boot-time minimal, I'm hoping to find something that has a stripped down web browser, and/or VNC capabilities. Speaker/Mic for intercom/phone is a bonus. The HA controller can provide content for the touch panel to display. Wireless touchpanels would be nice too, and I think Viewsonic will be capturing that market with there Airboard product.
3) Lighting Controllers. The Crestron stuff is very nicely done, but it would be nice to have that functionality in a 'smart can' that has an ethernet jack on it, and no need for a proprietary connection to it's controller.
4) IP based audio/video distribution. There are some, but of the IP based ones, I think (not sure) they are all proprietary. What I have seen is a server w/ many clients packaged together. I don't think there is any standard to go on, so all the manufacturers roll thier own. What I would like to find is something like the Turtle Beach Audiotron, but for audio and video, and preferable HD video. Roku is almost there, but is too rough around the edges to install into a custom job. The only standard I can think of to get media from server to client is to use Windows shares (smb), so instead of channels you have folders and files.
Interfacing to everything else should be a non-issue.
Phones - I actually want to pitch Vonage (VoIP provider) as the telco, and Cisco has a new 802.11 handset that looks like a killer product.
The architecture I was thinking of is to have a small PC based HA controller built for reliability, with the wall plates, touch panels, PDAs, and other wireless stuff sending commands. Media would come from HTPCs, Storage arrays, internet, and the clients would be small windows media center boxes. Also, power over ethernet, IEEE802.3af, should make it possible to run only CAT5 to all the locations around the house.
If I can find all the pieces, I know a couple people that would be willing to be ginuea pigs and do this instead of Crestron.
-LNB
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