Bits CEDIA 2009: Home Automation and more

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/events/2009/06/27/cedia-2009-home-automation-and-more/1

This week we headed along to the CEDIA Expo 2009 at the Excel centre in London to take a look at the latest innovations in home theatre, AV and home automation technology. Waiting for us were programmable bathtubs, £6,000 Blu-ray players and a 103in Plasma TV - read on to find out more!

 

Cheers for the coverage. Home automation has always been a passion of mine but X10 is a little bit crappy these days. Nice to see some alternatives are cropping up all be it at quite a price by the sounds of things.

 

Nice read. Thanks lads!

 

What??? No casemods???

 

Awww, bless Harry and that TV

 

Got two of those 103" panasonics in the reception at work..friggin HUGE.

 

Those HDHomeRuns are nice, also. We use a few at work for different things.

 

People will get fat really quick. BTW The 103" tv is awesome

 

Surely you can make a better Bluray player than that for well under half the price. Understandably it is mostly for backup/streaming purposes and of course the always important e-peen
To me it seems like almost every one of these things will soon be or has already been eclipsed by other products.

 

What about a waterproof laptop? (for the bathtub)

 

This is what I will have in my house, although, I am planning on doing most of it myself. Should be easy enough although I think I will have to purchase the software as my coding skills are lacking.

 

If you know you're electronics or are an electrician in real life, then there's nothing to stop you - good on you!

 

Which part are you planning on having in your house?
The reasons why home automation costs so much is that it has to be absolutely bullet proof. If everything in your home - lighting, heating, security, window treatments, aduio/video distribution, etc. - is controlled by a central system, just one glitch can make your whole house unusable.

Having run my own company speciailising in all this stuff (although I've had to close the business, and this year is the first year that I haven't been to CEDIA in a long time), the logic required to tie all the separate systems of a house together can be mindboggling.

If you're just talking about video or music servers, then yes, it may be cheaper, but it probably won't look as good or be as robust and as easy to use as a pre-built system from Kaliedescape, Mediamax or Imerge.

You've got to remember that bit-tech readers are vastly more technical than the average home owner - and for the rest of the population, all they're interested in is how it looks and how easy it is to use. In the right market, there's no price you can put on those two commodities

 

Running a bath from abroad seems monumentally pointless. Everything else is pretty awesome though, but I do have to agree with the sentiment expressed by r4tch3t - if you know your stuff it should be fairly easy.

 

But being able to txt your home when you leave work to have a bath ready for you is great for the ladies, my partner showed great interest in this possibility of Home Automation. From abroad it is pointless. Another thing would be security if you went away, you can make the house look occupied, opening curtains switching lights and TV etc.

It wouldn't be that hard to patch something together to be controlled from a laptop or control panel, but it would not be that flexible. I would make the logic circuits myself and have some kind of software to monitor them all with access to the software is by wireless tablet or e-mail/txt. As for fail safes there would be a master switch which turned it all off if it got stuck in a loop or something. and if something went wrong the system would de-activate. Not the best option, but at least you can still use everything the normal way.