Every couple of weeks, we get a call from some
company professing to have the latest invention
that will forever revolutionise our way of life.
Needless to say, most of them are far from
revolutionary. When we first arrived at the
single-shop lot residence of Inix Solutions, it
looked like a hundred other non-revolutionary
single shop lots that we've seen before.
We met the CEO, Jimmy, who explained how their
SecureSmith project works. Basically, it uses
existing power lines to transmit data within a
household, so that you can manage everything
from security-cams to changing the channels on
your television. We were impressed, but the
skepticism remained.
Then they
brought us upstairs, and the skepticism
disappeared. the top floor of this humble
shoplot in Subang had been converted to a
showroom floor of the technologies. they had a
mini-apartment, complete the expensive-looking
art-decor type modern finishings, except that
you could turn on or off any device and check
for burglars through a phone, PDA, website or
even through
your own TV.
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By
placing this circuit board on your power
console, you can manage all the
electrical items in your house via PC,
PDA, phone or the Internet. |
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Electrical Highway
Let us
explain further. Each power plug in the
apartment has a special mini-processor,
which allows it to send and receive data
via the underlying power lines. All
these are hooked up to your central
power system, where a control
board resides to manage the system via
the power lines. |
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PLUG
AND PLAY: Using
this add-on, you can control any
item that's plugged in, and even
fade this light shown here.
Alternatively, the technology
can be built into new
condominiums, without the
add-on. |
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This control
board can be told what to do using a PC,
a phone, or even a PDA. Using the
SecureSmith software, the system has an
interface that allows you to turn on or
off any device, or even vary the voltage
being passed to it (e.g. dimming the
light to 50%). The software is also
capable of receiving video signals from
specially designed security-cams, that
have a separate module for motion
detection. In other words, it works
similar to the products already on the
market, just that it sends data through the power |
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cables instead of any sort of
conventional data-medium, such as CAT-5
or radio waves.
A special
module also allows you to transmit
Infrared signals to specified devices,
and can store up to 5 preset commands.
For instance, if you choose to calibrate
it to a TV, you can set a Volume
up/down, a Channel up/down and a turn
off signal. The way this works is that
you simply set the IR device to program,
and then click a button on your TV
remote control. |
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| DON'T
MOVE!: This
security-cam detect movement and
feed live video to a website or
PC so you can see whether the
children are partying while
you're away. |
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That command
is then saved as Command1. Then you
click a 2nd button and save that as
Command2 and so on. You can then change
the names of these commands to whatever
they do, i.e. "VolumeUp" or
"On/Off".
Using a
PC, or through a web interface, you can
see the entire layout of the apartment,
and a live feed of each camera you click
on. With the video data transmitted via
power cables, the feed we saw during the
demo was smooth, with |
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