So me and my girlfriend watched Iron Man the other night. Personally I love this movie, but I know a lot of people weren’t too impressed. Anyway, I found myself fantasizing not about the suit, but about his house. More specifically, the way his house was essentially run by these nifty little touchscreen panels, and with the aid of Jarvis of course. I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Damn…I wish I could have something like that.â€? Then I started to seriously ponder it. Why can’t I have something like that? Assuming stable funds, though nothing close to astronomically high, this is actually a reasonably possible idea. Forgive me if the following makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I’m currently at work at 12am, and I’m honestly trying to think through the ins and outs of this as I go.

Scenario

Out of college. Stable, decently paying job. Ready to move out from my parents’ house and build my own.

Networking

Obviously a great amount of networking would have to be done. During the process of building the house, I would connect all of the various rooms through wall mounted ethernet ports. Nothing terribly difficult really. All of these connections would meet up at a switch located in…

The Server Room

Yes…I want to have a fucking server room in my house. Don’t judge. But really, this seems to be the best option as far as I can imagine. The server would be in charge of accepting data from various inputs, and then figuring out what to do with that data. E.g. a request for some sort of information would have to be directed somewhere that the information can be acquired. Additionally, it could function as a media server. To be honest I haven’t decided if it would be more efficient, or even necessary, to have a secondary media server that doesn’t have to deal with requests from anywhere but the primary control server. This would probably have to be determined by the amount of stress this system would end up putting on the server box. If it was enough to bog it down (which I don’t think it would be) then I think a media server may be beneficial. More on the purpose of the server later.

Interface

So this is where it gets slightly more interesting. Wall mounted android tablets flush with the rest of the wall. These mounts would have to have a way to charge these tablets constantly, but that would be as simple as running a cable. Now these tablets would run a special app written by myself to interface with the server through the network. Given that this would simply be an app, it could also be installed on “normalâ€? tablets (not mounted on the wall). This app would handle user input, and prompt the server to perform certain tasks based on this input. All of these tablets, as well as any computers on my network, would communicate directly with the server and make requests. This means that only the server has to “knowâ€? how to do things. The points of interface would mostly just have to pass information back and forth.

What would it do?

Right now my primary idea is to make them “householdâ€? media remotes. What this means is that, through the use of a tablet, you could do something like load Netflix and stream a movie from the server to a television located somewhere in the house. I’d like to do something to the effect of choosing a source and a destination, which can be selected through an interface resembling a floor plan of the house. This will basically open up a stream of media between these two objects. This could be loading a movie stored on the media server and playing it through a television, or playing what’s on some television in the house on whatever tablet you happen to be working from. Another use would be music playback. I’d like to mount speakers in just about every room, and have the possibility to play audio all through the house. However, I’d like it to be flexible enough that I can decide what plays through which speakers, essentially being able to play audio from different sources in different rooms. Security cameras outside the house could also be a possible media source you can stream. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. This system could, potentially, run EVERYTHING in your house. All you would need would be some kind of breaker that you can manipulate through software, and you can turn lights on and off throughout the house, as well as anything you control the electrical current to. Even crazier, you could make your house do things from across the world if you made this system accessible outside of your LAN (suddenly internet security is much more important).

Honestly, the cost to do something like this wouldn’t be terribly extreme. The hardest part would actually be simply paying for the house itself. The control server, a handful of tablets, speakers, webcams, and various other possible tech could all be purchased for under $10,000 (which, given what would be accomplished, isn’t all that much in my opinion.)

Just a silly idea, I know, but I think I really would like to give it a shot one of these days.