Home Gateway Initiative

It looks like the Europeans have started an organization (Home Gateway Initiative) to develop standard specs for "Home Gateways." This is how they define a home gateway:

The home gateway is a high tech device ensuring continuity between the home network(s) and the in home connected devices and the external world represented by a wide area network (WAN).

The device that initially offered broadband access was a basic modem and has evolved to a wireless enabled modem router to meet the demand of consumers. But this equipment is not enough to meet the next generation of services, thus there is a need of a more capable device that we call “home gateway”. The home gateway is the device offering broadband connectivity to the home and delivering services to the home environment and the different devices & interfaces composing it.

Requirements
The next generation of services has created the new requirements for the home gateway to fulfill:

* Providing a remote management service for the home gateway & the devices beyond,
* Allowing the right device or application to connect to the right service platform with the right service class / Quality of Service,
* Recognizing and potentially uniting devices capabilities
* Playing a role in the local network to federate device capabilities and offer customers a better “integrated home environment”.

These requirements imply a device that is constantly monitoring the home network, which has obvious energy implications, both for the gateway itself and possibly for the other networked devices.

lopomo

lopomo

From Today's NYT Circuits section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/technology/circuits/12fridge.html
The connections are not digital so that low power consumption
can be low--just the remote and power button. I think that having
USB and being able to put up a computer screen are logical next
steps.
--Bruce


Now You Can Raid the TV During the Commercials

By MICHEL MARRIOTT

Published: May 12, 2005

Some 50 years after the TV dinner was introduced to American homes, LG Electronics USA has created the TV Refrigerator. But it is more than something to raid while watching television.

This $3,150 refrigerator is the television.

The refrigerator, available from major retailers like Best Buy and P. C. Richard, has a 13.1-inch liquid-crystal display built into the right door (opposite a water and ice dispenser in the left door). LG designers say the appliance saves counter space.

The television includes an FM radio tuner and 1.5-watt stereo speakers, is cable- and satellite-ready (a coaxial port is built into the right door hinge) and provides inputs for a DVD player or VCR on the side of the door. The refrigerator, which is 68 inches tall and weighs 335 pounds, comes with a wireless remote control.

And fear not for your ice cream: a special cooling system prevents heat generated by the television from affecting the environs of the refrigerator's sealed interior.

Pittsburgh Post article about standby power

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a recent article about standby power, which had prominent quotes from Alan and Bruce. An interesting product they mention is an "intelligent" surge protector from OneClickPower, a UK company that is

"not, however, scare mongering beardy weirdoes on an environmental crusade, but committed and informed futurists who believe that commerce, profit and pleasure need not have consequences for the earth's natural resources, or well being."

The intelligence of the surge protector is actually quite simple. It has one uncontrolled outlet that the PC plugs into; when the power draw from that outlet drops below a certain level, it shuts off power to all the other outlets as well (which could have other computer peripherals or electronics plugged into them). I saw a similar power strip prototype from someone at Novem at the Berkeley standby power workshop a couple of years ago. In that case, the control signal came from a USB cable plugged into the PC's USB port, so when the USB bus loses power, the power strip shuts off power to all its outlets.


The idea of using the PC to control the power to its peripherals suggests the opportunity for further integration of power supply and management within the PC "ecosystem." ACPI was supposed to provide some of this integration, but in practice it seems not to be used much. Powering peripherals from the computer's power supply can be accomplished with USB, but the allowable power levels are too low for most devices (at least with standard USB; maybe the new revisions will help expand this opportunity). I think it would be worth looking at the savings potential from this integration, to see if further work here is warranted.