Home Automation Roundup

With all the news coming out in anticipation of CEDIA, I thought I’d spend a little time on a topic very near and dear to my heart.  One of the toughest parts of creating a professional looking DIY home automation system is finding a great looking and functioning touch screen.  High end vendors such as Crestron and AMX have their own proprietary hardware that really looks slick, but they are cost prohibitive for most of us.  A lot of us in the DIY home automation hobby have turned to Ebay to find several older, as well as newer web clients and tablet PCs to repurpose as touch screens for our projects.  Over the years I have accumulated a “museum” of various products.  Hopefully this guide will help you decide which one is right for you. 

The early days – a hardwired touch screen

My first attempt was to use several Elo touch screens hardwired to a central pc.  These actually worked out pretty good and a lot of users still use them or smaller alternatives.  They can be picked up pretty cheaply (all things considered), produce an excellent image, and have great response times since they are hardwired to a central or several PCs.  I started moving away from them because as I added more it was getting considerably harder to get VGA cables where I needed them, and I didn’t want to spend the money to pull cat-5 and run use a balun at each location.  Aesthetically, the larger screens from Elo, 3M, Planar and others, looked a little out of place in the living room or theater.  Smaller screens from companies such as Lilliput were nicer, but I still had the problem of getting a VGA cable to each location, so I moved on…

The beginning of the wireless era – the Viewsonic Air Panel

Next up was the Viewsonic V110 and V150 Airpanels.  These really looked promising, and to be honest I still occasionally use one today.  The v110 was especially nice because it had just about the perfect screen size for most uses.  So perfect that Crestron actually adopted a version it for the iSys wireless pad (it was actually based on the 210, which was the successor). The 10” screen had a native 800×600 resolution and an optional doc was a nice touch because you just had to set the touch panel in the cradle and not have to worry about fumbling around with a power cord for recharging. 

The v150 was similar, but had a few drawbacks that made it less usable for my needs.  First the size and weight was too big to serve as a handheld.  Second, the v150 was designed to serve as a monitor for a pc when docked, and then switch into remove mode when removed it.  Because of this, when the unit was docked you lost touch screen functionality.  Some users found that if you placed electrical tape over some of the pins on the bottom, you could keep the touch screen functionality even in the dock while charging.  You just had to check on the tape from time to time, to make sure that it hadn’t fallen off or become loose.

I started moving away from these devices because they were basically thin clients.  You had to connect to the host pc via RDP.  With that came the issues of screen repainting as you navigated from screen to screen.  The devices also only had 802.11b networks cards, and mine proved to have a very limited range.  This caused some of the screen changes to happen very slowly.  Also, when the panels lost connection with their host pc, you often had to reboot them to get them to reconnect.  Time to move on again…

Resurrecting the dinosaur – the Fujitsu Stylistics

I next moved to another popular choice, the Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 (and similar 3400).  Before I go into any other details, I gotta say, these things are UGLY.  As you can see from the picture the light gray wasn’t cutting it on mine, I had to repaint it black.  OK, so back to the info.  The Stylistic was the first full blown self contained touch screen pc in my lineup.  Various models were available offering different screen options.  All units had a 10” display and the base unit had an 800×600 resolution.  Other variants offered a 1024×768 resolution or a trans-reflective coating for outdoor use.  The later is the version I had, and it did perform pretty well in the outdoors. 

Unfortunately the service life of the Stylistic in my lineup was relatively short and here the reasons.  First, the unit still functions today, so it had nothing to do with it breaking.  On the contrary, these things are built pretty sturdily.  The main reason, as I stated earlier, they are just plain ugly!  They have a pretty thick profile, measuring in at 1”, and a weight of approximately 2.5 lbs.  Those two factors make for a less than desirable “remote” to hold with one hand for any length of time. 

I mentioned above that they were actually PCs, rather than thin clients like the Airpanels, but their specs were nothing to brag about.  The 3400 utilizes a Pentium 400 Mhz Celeron processor, and the 3500 includesa 500 Mhz processor.  With graphically intensive automation apps, such as Cinemar’s MainLobby, they just didn’t perform well.  I actually ended going back to using RDP with these apps because they performed better.  Another downfall of these units was they did not have an integrated wireless card.  Instead you had to use a PCMCIA card and therefore have the antenna sticking out of the side. 

Several Docking options were available.  The standard dock offered the most connectivity including an integrated 10/100 Mbps LAN connection, ps2 connectors for a keyboard and mouse, as well as USB ports.  The downside of this variation, is the tablets did not come off the dock with ease.  You really had to give them a tug to get them out.  A high usage dock was also available which served mainly to recharge the device and omitted most of  the connectivity options found on  the basic dock, but at least it was easy to remove the unit.  A wall mount was available too, but I never had one of these so I can’t offer much input.

Another big downfall of these units was the sensitivity of the touch screen surface.  Although it was a resistive touch screen, you either had to use the tip of your finger nail or the included stylus because the screen was not sensitive enough to detect a press from your finger alone.

These units are still pretty easily found on Ebay and can be obtained pretty economically, although, as you can tell, I don’t recommend them.  Now, finally, on to something a little more interesting…

The perfect solution? Not quite… – Introducing the UMPC

Well nothing is perfect, but these are probably about the best option we have currently.  I own both the Samsung Q1 and TabletKiosk eo7209.  Both have their individual strengths and weaknesses. 

First the commonalities of the devices; both are self contained PCs running Windows XP Tablet PC edition.  They both include sensitive resistive touch surfaces that respond well to finger touch (although they both include a stylus). They have similar size and weight, both contain a 900 Mhz processor (new models are a bit faster), a 8.4” 800×480 screen, integrated 802.11g wireless cards, and similar 1.5 hour battery life under normal conditions.  They both have similar disadvantages which I will discuss later.

The Samsung comes in an elegant piano black finish that, unfortunately is a finger print magnet.  One of the downfalls of the original Q1 is that there wasn’t a dock available, although it does have an integrated collapsible stand.  Every time you want to set the device down and recharge, you have to plug the adapter in, thus making it look a little less “refined” than some of the high end systems.  I believe the current version of the q1 does offer a dock.  The one thing missing from the Q1 is hard buttons.  There is a directional pad, but that is about it.  The screen is clear and bright, and wireless performance is excellent.

The TableKiosk eo7209 addresses many of the shortcomings of the Q1, but introduces some of its own. First, the TabletKiosk comes in a flat black finish.  Although not as flashy as the finish of the Q1, it is not susceptible to finger prints.  I’ll take fingerprint free over a glossy finish any day.  The TabletKiosk also comes with a charging dock standard, and you can easily remove and replace the tablet on it.  In addition to the directional hard buttons, a few others are added and can be assigned (at least with MainLobby) to control other things.  For example, I use them to perform operations like channel up/down, or track search.  A 1.3 megapixel web camera and microphone are also included, which, if you are creative, can be used for some pretty cool things.  Using the beta of MainLobby ‘s media streaming plugin, I was able to effectively use the cameras to create a integrated video “intercom” between multiple devices.  Very cool!  On the down side, the TabletKiosk’s wireless card has really poor range and performance, and therefore  the system does not seem as snappy at times.  A lot of my scenes heavily utilize two way communication between the touch screen and my Yamaha receiver.  If the wireless performance is poor, I often see delays.

Although generally I’m pretty happy with the UMPCs, and I’m sure they will be the main stay of my setup for quite some time, they’re still not perfect.  Why?  Three reasons:  Fan noise, battery life, and..oh… FAN NOISE!!!!  Maybe I’m just really picky about things but you can definitely here the fan running, which seems constant, during any soft scenes of a movie.  The TabletKiosk is especially bad.  I can often hear it from across the room. 

 So that about wraps up my progression down touch screen lane.  I’ve started exploring some new options for light weight devices, but don’t have a lot to report so far.  One that shows a lot of promise is the Nokia 770/800 web tablets.  They are light, have very bright and sharp screens, hold a long battery charge, have integrated wireless cards, and are very economical.  I picked up my 770 for about $150.  The downside of these devices is that, at four inches, the screen is a bit small for primary use, but for specialized purposes such as lighting control, it works out pretty nicely.  The other downside is they don’t have the processing power to run your interface software natively (I am only familiar with MainLobby, so Charmed Quark or others may be different).  Instead I have to resort by to my trusty friend RDP, but the response is pretty impressive and the screen repainting is acceptable.  I am hoping now that MainLobby has an integrated web server, I will be able to follow their examples to create web pages that will run natively within the web browser.

Well thanks for taking the time to read and I’ll keep you updated on my progress with the 770.  In the interim, if you have any questions or want more input, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.