Music, Lights, Action - With One Click

Devices that let you control many appliances from your couch are increasingly accessible -- and affordable

How can you be a proper couch potato if you have to get up to pull down the shades, flick on the lights, turn up the heat, turn off the oven, and see who's at the door, all the while fiddling with the controls on your home-theater system? The answer: Make your home smarter. Thanks to the digitization of many consumer-electronics products and the rise of personal Wi-Fi networks, you can buy a wireless system for little more than $400 that will let you control many of the moving parts in your home from a touch screen pad or remote device.

About the only thing the midpriced touch screen remotes don't have is intelligence. In the wide world of remotes that simply means being able to tell whether a component is on or off. That may not sound like much until you consider the annoying snafus that can occur in a home theater system. Say you've programmed a macro button to turn on the A/V receiver, the TV and the VCR, put the receiver in Dolby Digital mode and go to play on the VCR. Everything's great unless you have one of those VCRs that automatically powers up when you insert a tape. When you hit the macro, the remote only knows to issue a command to reverse the current state of the equipment. So everything turns on but the VCR, which turns off.

Until recently, the home automation market has been worth less than $450 million annually. That's mainly because retrofitting the millions of older homes involved tearing through walls to snake in cables. With these new technologies, and more in the works, such as wireless video camera systems from companies like WiLife, you can send your basket of remotes into early retirement.
Most people have too many remote controls, which too often get lost under the couch pillows or misplaced in another room. There are ways to consolidate all your TV remote controls into one universal remote.

The trick is to get the right universal TV remote so that you have the ability to run all your entertainment equipment. Some of the new TV set top boxes, such as digital video recorders, have special functions that are not included on every universal remote controls. The best universal remotes have the ability to learn any remote function. This means is you can program the universal remote by holding the original remote control right in front of it, and press any button so the universal remote can “memorize” the code. Some of the more expensive universal remotes have LCD screens so that you can customize each function with a special button. The screens also can change as you switch to control a different device. So if you have too many TV remotes it may be time to consolidate!

These are some complicated and expensive solutions to what seems a simple issue. Wouldn't it just be easier if all equipment used the same remote codes?

RESOURCES:

WWW.COMPUTERWORLD.COM
WWW.HIDDENWIRES.CO.UK
WWW.PRESENTATION.DIGITALMEDIANET.COM
WWW.HIFI-REMOTE.COM
WWW.TVBLANKET.COM