Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

For those that know me well, I have what many could call a “small” problem with collections of remotes. The reason I say collections is it seems that I always have a remote that can do just about everything that I want but its missing that one key that I am just too lazy to program manually.  Now this stems from my living room with a collection, to my bedroom, theater, office, kitchen and so on … every room with at least two and some going on 7-8 remotes.
I have been after the perfect remote for years now and I have to tell you I am very excited to get my hands on a SideShow remote for my vista MCE!
Before we go too far, let me describe to you what I consider to be the perfect remote.

IT can arm my alarm, check my events in the alarm and basic events for the security system.
It should show my security cams
I can view my DVD jackets off of my DVD changer
I can see what’s receded on my HTPC w/o having to interrupt everyone watching a movie
I should be able to select and play music
I should be able to change it to different rooms to select different sets of equipment (bedroom vs living room)
I should be able to turn on my lights and adjust the modes in the house (HomeSeer)
And by all means make it event based so I don’t have to explain how to run it to everyone new that comes over to my house.
Take into consideration that this in theory should not be that hard, but your house tends to be the dumbest thing you own.  You car unlocks your doors from afar, starts by itself, turns the lights on when you need them, windshield wipers as needed, adjust heat/cooling in 5 places, lets you know before you run out of fuel, warns you when it’s not running right and the list continues.  Your house on the other hand has one or two light switches per room, you stumble in the dark feeling the walls to get around at 2AM, seems to have the thermostat in the most annoying place, has no clue if you have 2 inches of water in your basement, doesn’t tell you if you are going to run out of salt in your softener, has no idea if the light bulbs are burnt out and so on.

Why on earth cant builders just integrate this just a little better?  Why can’t we have OnStar for our home to let us in when we get locked out? (I would have used that a few times by now!)
So back to my quest for a remote.
I have tried all in one remotes, prontos, PDA’s with pimped out software but nothing seems to function the way it should.  For starters my IR system in my house is worthless and it seems like I am aiming the remote in some of the oddest places – when I do get it to work I don’t want to move in fear I won’t be able to stop my Tivo from fast forwarding.

Looking at CES this year, one of the most gripping things  I saw was the introduction of the SideShow remotes.  I understand my list above will not be solved with round one of the remotes but I have to tell you this is some awesome stuff!  I am looking very forward to finally getting my hands on the Ricavision’s Vista MCE SideShow and should hopefully be on its way soon!  Its hard to know for sure that this will do out of the box as it has yet to hit the store shelves, but if they position it much like MCE whereas you can add additional modules to the remote/vista to manipulate the experience this is going to be hard to put down.

BTW – Did I mention that its Bluetooth and will work up to 100 yards?  No more issues with walking to the IR repeater to hit play!!
More on this when I get that wonderful package in the mail!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Home Automation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.