Статьи 5 семестр / Microprocessors in 2020 (3)

Touchy Subjects

A touchpanel simplifies the control of a sophisticated entertainment system and gives a busy mom a quick way to manage her household.

We've all juggled our share of remote controls; we've lost them, we've cursed them, and some like Curt Steiner have given up on them completely. In their place, he uses a single touchpanel to effort­lessly operate every component in his media room.

Steiner and his wife, Jan, have an entertainment system that features not one TV, but four. Each TV can display something different. "The three small TVs around the big TV function as monitors," Curt says. "They just show us things like news and sports, usu­ally without any sound, while the big screen might show a movie." In a setup like this, a touchpanel becomes a critical tool. With it, Curt and Jan can select what to watch on each TV without having to hunt down a specific remote for each. The company that designed and installed their touchpanel-managed entertainment system, Progressive Audio, Columbus, OH, developed a menu for the touchpanel that Curt says is completely dummy-proof. "It took just a few minutes to learn," he says.

While touchpanels may have gotten their start in media rooms, they are just as handy to have in the kitchen, discovered another Ohio homeowner who contracted Digital Convergence Systems, Westlake, OH, to design and install a home man­agement system for her family. The 15-inch touch-panel in this busy mom's kitchen gives her com­plete control of just about everything in the four-story house. From it she can activate music on a certain floor or throughout the entire house, arrange the lights for bedtime, adjust the tempera­ture in any area, see who's ringing the doorbell, and oh, yes … watch TV. The touch panel trans­forms into a TV screen at the touch of a button.

"The touch panel is more user-friendly than grab­bing a bunch of remotes," says the homeowner. "My kids can all operate it, and I have a seven-year-old."

While the big panel in the kitchen serves as the command post of the house, this homeowner favors using the smaller 3-by-5-inch wall-mounted touch-panels that reside in each room. "I can control every thing from them and set up scenes, like the party scene that arranges the lights and turns on light jazz from the digital satellite sys­tem," she says. The various touch pan­els—there's also one in each media room—help this house keep pace with the daily routines of a busy family.

Control on the Go

A PDA makes an ideal portable home control interface. Rob Schumacher uses his Toshiba 740E to operate everything from motorized drapes to an outdoor hot tub.

■ With the right software, a PDA, like the Toshiba Pocket PC, can communicate commands to a home's lights, thermostats, security system, motorized gates and more.

PDA Benefits

More affordable than many wall-mounted interfaces. Can perform standard PDA functions as well as home control functions. Is portable and convenient to use.

There's something so liberating about using a PDA. You have a datebook, a way to transmit email, and every speck of important information in the palm of your hand. Rob Schumacher car­ries his Toshiba 740E PDA wherever he goes to keep track of the many construction jobs he super­vises in Northern California. So he thought if his PDA could keep his busy workday in order, why couldn't it do the same for his home's sophisti­cated electronic systems?

Come to find out, it could. Rob's home sys­tems installer, Paul Wright of Home Systems Integrators in Granite Bay, CA, transformed the Toshiba handheld into a home control device by loading special home control software into it and into Rob's home computer. Using the software, Wright wrote a few simple commands for some of the systems of the house to follow. Buttons on the PDA now operate the home's Brilliance lighting con­trol system from Lightolier, as well as three garage door openers, an outdoor hot tub and motorized window shades. Each system would ordinarily be controlled by its own interface, be it a keypad or a simple wall switch. The CENDI software from Centralite unites all the systems together under a common operating platform so that one portable PDA can conveniently control them all.

The PDA really comes in handy when Rob is strolling his property or working in his home office, which is detached from the house. Rather than rush back to the house to activate the hot tub or turn on the exterior lights, he can turn on both from