Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Chapter 14: Other Cool Things You Can Network
plays an important part in helping consolidate and integrate your car’s
wireless network with devices inside the car and to connect it with your
home’s network as these two areas converge.
The response has been a flurry of activity by auto manufacturers and others
to network enable cars with wireless phone, data, video, audio, and control
mechanisms that resemble the same efforts going on inside your house by
other consumer goods manufacturers. In fact, you’re starting to see entire
product lines that include home and car wireless network products.
For years, efforts to wirelessly sync the car to other places had been going full
steam ahead — that is, until the iPod came along. The iPod offers portability
of entire music collections in ways that had not been seen before, and the
focus shifted from trying to get music into your car wirelessly to just carrying
it into the car on your iPod. We think this is a temporary swing to an extreme,
and that the ideal solution is in the middle — a computer presence in the car
that can reach out and synchronize with the home, and yet have connectivity
to portable devices via Bluetooth, 802.11, and other technologies.
Yet portable devices (such as Zunes) aren’t going away anytime soon. The
best solution is not to build a bunch of different hardwired connections into
the car, but rather to build a car that can modularly accept them and make
the best wireless connection for the user. At the same time, we think that
network connectivity in car devices — whether it be Wi-Fi in the garage or in
an “information filling station” at your local drug store, or cellular broadband
data on the road — is absolutely the best way to go moving forward.
Although it’s tempting to focus on linking iPod and Zunes and cell phones
to your car, we think that approach is shortsighted. So we cover both
approaches, one with more of an eye to the future than the other.
Synching your car with devices in the car
By far the most common approach today to integrating music players and
other content devices to the car’s audio system has been through FM transmitters
— small add-on accessories that take the output from the device’s
headphone jack and transmit it over an available FM frequency so your car’s
stereo can be tuned into it. Simple, quick, and cheap. Whether you’re talking
about an iPod, Zune, or other unit, you can find a range of FM transmitters for
$10 and up. Companies such as Griffin Technology (www.griffintechnology.
com) are known for their MP3 player accessories.
In the wireless realm, Parrot (www.driveblue.com) offers a number of retrofit
Bluetooth-enabled music controllers that capture the music sent by your
Bluetooth stereo mobile phone or MP3 player and redirect it to the vehicle’s
speakers (which automatically mute anything else playing). You can scroll
through the titles via a simple LCD screen that attaches to your dashboard.
The Parrot MK6100, for instance, is about $250.
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