remote control IR & fiber optics

[svandamme]

Let's say you want a house with tv and sound wherever you go, but you don't want to put a frigging stereo set in each room, or a tv tuner/digital decoder in each room where you have a TV...


Wouldn't it be possible, if while renovating a house, to work with fiber optics?

You put all the black boxes in a dedicated place , and you install a fiber optic cable to each room where you need access...

Then with one of them programmable remote controllers, you point to where the Fiber optics thing is, and turn on/off what you want.... then the FO will transfer the IR signal to the IR receiver on the device...

Audio you could for instance always use the same control signal in each room, since the FO would route the IR signal to a different receiver, you could individually control each seperate room with the same signal...


any ideas if this would work, and be practical/reliable??

I might be buying a house next year, and starting to think about what i'de do with it...

another idea is to not have 220v AC everywhere... and have a parallel circuit of 12v dc since many things these days require DC adapters anyway.. and they are bloody taking up more space then i care for... so either you created cabinets for all the junk and cables... or you eliminate the junk... which is what i'm thinking of now...
Lighting, with LED's won't need 220v either...
12dc will also permit for an easier, maybe even cheaper installation of a solar power setup.. no conversion, off the shelf parts...
keep the juice usage low, and maybe use a couple of car batteries for accumulation...

(i don't think the energy companies will keep paying for home production, at least not worthwhile, they are already starting to complain about surges at the end nodes due to home produced energy, and that their networks ain't designed for end node production)

[rick-l]

Originally Posted by svandamme

Let's say you want a house with TV and sound wherever you go, but you don't want to put a frigging stereo set in each room, or a TV tuner/digital decoder in each room where you have a TV...


Wouldn't it be possible, if while renovating a house, to work with fiber optics?

You could get the data to each room with fiber optics but if you want to look at something you will need a display (with power for the cold cathode fluorescent display) and if you want to hear something a Power amplifier with speakers. So you would still need a TV and stereo in each location.

LEDs are a long way from replacing conventional lighting. The white LEDs now are (If I remember correctly) a red LED that excites a blue and a green phosphor in the LED enclosure. The frequency spectrum has three distinct spikes. If you look at the source the LED looks white but if you look at something that the light reflects off of its color is unpredictable.

Don't let this stop you however. The are plenty of Audio Visual toys out there to play with.

[svandamme]

For audio i can run the speakers cables with the same wire as the 12dc.. not really a problem

for screens... hdmi cabling can do 5 meter, but i've been told 15 meter will work if the cable is high quality...

Now i'm not talking a big house here, and the idea is to set it up for my own comfort
eg, tv in living room , tv in kitchen, tv in bedroom... and no boxes anywhere, just a VESA monitor mount, power cable... and a small FO receiver

Anywhere i go, i see what i wanna see, and change the channel, go somewhere else, and still see the channel....

Crossing walls, i doubt i would even go much above 5meter cable lenght, the place i want to put the gear is very central

as for LED's , i don't like bright light much.. and i do like some color in it...

I'm thinking indirect light which fades through the color spectrum as ambient light... possibly controlled via house computer... bit like the Mathmos gear, but then "built-in"

so if i don't like the color on the walls, i change it. i hate painting walls or putting up wallpaper.

And then a couple of spot lights just where i need it, when i need it (kitchen, bathroom, living room, desk)

But i'm far from actually building anything, just toying with the ideas

[RWebb]

put in plastic pipe so you can upgrade over time

fiber is not gonna be cheap right now

for audio you can run CAT5 - a friend just did that

HDMI for both

but think about how you will control the thing remotely....

or wait for WiMax