Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
Okay, so these aren’t necessarily new and don’t require a wireless home
network. But when you can use wireless networks to connect these
devices to the rest of your home’s other systems, you can start experiencing
a whole home network. Imagine using that wireless connection
to link to your home automation system, such as the one we discuss in
Chapter 14. When you utter “Start the car,” the system communicates
with the car and gets it into the right temperature setting — based on
the present temperature outside (it gets its readings from its Davis
Instruments backyard wireless weather station (www.davisnet.com/
weather/products/index.asp).
Look soon for neat combinations between car monitoring systems and the
Bluetooth capabilities on cell phones to be able to distinguish which phones
(and therefore which people) are traveling around in your car!
Your Home Appliances
Most attempts to converge the Internet and home appliances have been
prototypes and concept products — a few products are on the market, but
we would be less than honest if we said that the quantities being sold were
anything but mass market yet. LGE (www.lge.com) was the first in the world
to introduce the Internet refrigerator — a Home Network product with
Internet access capability — back in June 2000 (see Figure 19-2). LGE soon
introduced other Internet-based information appliance products in the washing
machine, air conditioner, and microwave areas. The Internet refrigerator
is outfitted with a 15-inch detachable LCD touch screen that serves as a TV
monitor, computer screen, stereo, and digital camera all in one. You can call
your refrigerator from your cell phone, PDA, or any Internet-enabled device.
LGE also has an Internet air conditioner that allows you to download programs
into the device so that you can have preprogrammed cooling times,
just like with your heating system setbacks. Talk to your digital home theater
to preprogram something stored on your audio server to be playing when
you get home. It’s all interrelated, by sharing a network in common. Wireless
plays a part by enabling these devices to talk to one another in the home.
As of this writing, LGE sells a next-generation multimedia refrigerator (model
LSC27991, $3,800) that is more like a TV that happens to have a refrigerator
behind it. The refrigerator has two screens, one in each door, and is wirelessly
enabled for weather alerts (powered by Ambient Devices’ wireless
alerting network technology; see the sidebar “The wireless orb knows all”).
However, all TV and DVD connections are standard wired connections.