A week ago I decided that it was a little too quiet in the living room. We’ve been living in The Asia House now for over a year and a half without music on the ground floor, and the ceiling-mounted speakers weren’t doing much good just sitting there. Those of you who followed the construction of the house might recall that I had ceiling speakers installed in several locations in the house, with the speaker cables terminated in a hub in the basement. My problem now was how to best pipe music into the living room speakers, with proper remote control, in a cost-effective fashion.

I decided to experiment a little. First I hooked up a simple stereo amplifier in the basement and connected it to the 8-ohm speaker pair. Then I hooked up to the LAN a low-cost HP Netbook that I had recently received as a gift. I configured the Netbook to run iTunes (and not much else). With the speaker output plugged into the amplifier I could now play any sound off the Netbook through the living room speakers. But how to handle the remote control?

To the rescue came Apple’s great Remote app which I downloaded for free on their Appstore. As I have mentioned in a previous post, we have a couple of iPod Touch units which I want to use as remote controls for The Asia House’s systems. This was a perfect opportunity.

First I had to download (for $4.95 on the Appstore) an upgrade to the iPod Touch operating system. After that the Remote app easily synchronized with the copy of iTunes running on the Netbook in the basement using a secure pairing function. It took a little more work to add the links to over 2,500 internet radio stations that came with iTunes, but by adding one playlist for each genre and dragging-and-dropping the radio station titles into the appropriate playlists, I am now able to also select radio stations to play in the living room.

The next thing, of course, is to figure out how to connect the other speakers in the house in a similar fashion, without having to add too many PC’s. I have a couple of ideas on how to do that; now if I could only find enough time to do it in…

The Harmony remote control that I wrote about in June is perfect for the control of an audio/video setup, or in fact of anything that communicates via infrared. But in The Asia House there are also other systems that need to be remotely monitored or controlled, and for which there is no line-of-site infrared capability. To me, the best way is to manage communication via an in-house intranet website on the house server, via wireless LAN.

The iPod Touch is perfect for this. The user interface is great and it looks good. Here I’m showing one of the control pages for the Linksys wireless access point. My iPod Touch is encased in a plastic case for protection, and it also has a stand in the rear. Of course, I have not yet implemented any interesting control software on the house server, but they’re coming!

A few days ago I finally did get all the security cameras installed. Here’s what the user interface looks like on the online web interface:

Now our house is watched day and night, and all outdoor activities are recorded, time-stamped and digitally stored on hard-disk. There is also an alarm that goes off if any of the cameras are tampered with, or if there is any movement when and where there isn’t supposed to be. But more on the security system in a future post…

I think today’s installation epitomizes the design philosophy at The Asia House: comfortable but invisible technology. Today I installed a wireless LAN connection in The Asia House. See if you can spot the access point!

Don’t worry if you can’t see it – it’s above the barely visible manhole that’s recessed in the awning above the outdoor deck. You might have seen a picture of this location elsewhere in this blog. The location was planned during the design phase of the house, and the wiring was put in early on. The location that I had originally planned was actually on a small shelf under the ceiling in the dining room, but John (our architect) refused to have it visible, arguing that it contrasted with the modern Asian style of the house.

I know what you’re really thinking now: “how could they have lived in The Asia House for a year before they installed WiFi?”  Well, what can I say; we didn’t really need it. We seldom have guests that feel the need to whip out their laptops, and we have a LAN jack in every room. But last week I got an SMS message from my sister Mia, who lives in London. She was leaving in 10min but wanted to have a quick Skype call first, to greet me on my birthday. We were having dinner at the time, and she said “why don’t you just open the laptop at the dinner table, and I can talk to all of you?”. Well, now she can…

I found an old Linksys WRT54G wireless router lying around. Unfortunately I had hacked the firmware of the WRT54G a few years ago, and replaced it with third-party open source firmware in order to extend its functionality. I used an old Sveasoft binary, but if I were to do it again I’d probably use something from DD-WRT. Anyway, I wanted the router restored to its original factory configuration so I first downloaded the binary for the original firmware from the Linksys website and flashed it using the router’s web-based interface. Then I configured the router and tested it before installing it at the deck.

Since the wiring was already in place, all I had to do was crimp an RJ45 connector onto the LAN cable and also tie the power supply in place so it wouldn’t fall out. Finally, I bent the router antennas a bit in order to get a stronger signal in the basement. I’ll observe the network conditions for a week or two, and if it’s not good enough then I might replace this old Linksys router with a much better one from Belkin that I know I’ve got lying around here somewhere…

I finally got the first CCTV camera for the security system hooked up. By the time I was done it was almost sunset and it had started raining already. You can see the raindrops on the glass of the camera housing:

You can also clearly see the distortion of the wide angle lens, which I don’t mind since it also allows the camera a very wide field of view. A couple of hours later the weather got worse. It was pouring rain and very windy. Especially at our location on a hilltop, The Asia House is quite exposed to the elements. This is what the user interface to the Rover DVR looked like in a remote browser window when viewing the Camera 1 output:

The picture quality is awful. I’m not sure what those white streaks are – I think they’re spider web, but I’ll have to check it out and fix it in the morning. In fact, anything immediately in front of the camera housing throws a lot of infrared light right back into the camera. Each CCTV camera is equipped with dozens of infrared LED’s, enabling them to “see” in the dark. Here’s an interesting pair of photos of the first CCTV camera up on its post at the corner of The Asia House’s perimeter fence:

Both photos are taken with a Sony HDR-SR5 Handycam, but in the right photo I switched the Handycam to Night mode, which disables its built-in infrared filter. You can clearly see the infrared light emitted by the CCTV camera, which is otherwise invisible to the human eye.