28Oct DIY Wired Home with an extra PC

As part of our ongoing series, “Building the Wired Home,” we’ve been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They’ve gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. “Read more” to learn how our experiment worked out.

What in days not so long ago would have been mind-bogglingly-powerful processing machines are now powering our telephones, video game machines, digital video recorders, media servers, wireless routers, print servers, home automation controllers, ebook readers, multifunction remote controls, and even refrigerators. Much of this processing power and memory lies idle for much of the day, but nevertheless hums along, wasting electricity and representing a considerable monetary investment in technology that will soon be obsolete and needing replacement. It would make a lot more sense for one powerful computer, loaded with RAM and big hard disks (preferably in RAID 5) to act as the centralized nerve center of the house. It would end up being more convenient, more power-efficient, less expensive, and would provide a single point of upgrade.

This article will take a look at why systems like this aren’t more common, and what a system like this would look like, and how it works in the real world. We’ll also look at some things that maybe aren’t so common in today’s homes that a centralized home server can make possible.

The first step in making our home nerve center are the rather mundane issues of where to put it and how to connect it to everything. This brings up the #1 reason why these kinds of setups aren’t more common: most homes aren’t designed to accommodate the wires and cables required to make these systems work optimally. We covered this issues in-depth in an earlier article in this series, but suffice to say that had I not been able to run various types of cable through the walls while the house was being built, it would have been difficult and costly. Therefore, it would require more that just some clever engineering to make a home nerve center practical; it will take a minor but radical transformation of architectural practices. Nevertheless, I believe it would be a worthwhile endeavor.

See: OSNews for the rest.

I designed our home server to be located in a basement utility area right next to the patch panels where all of the home’s electrical wiring, both high and low voltage, converge. I had distributed cat5e, coaxial, low voltage power cable to various areas of the home, along with conduit to accommodate fiber optic or any other cable we’d want to run in the future. I also ran some long DVI and HDMI cables to strategic areas of the house. I did this so I could connect a couple of monitors directly to the machine. That’s one of the shortcomings of a home server that’s merely connected to the various home appliances via network. Though theoretically you can stream video over those network cables, it’s not an ideal situation, since the hardware you’d need is an expensive specialty item, and you’d typically need to dedicate some cat5 wires to the job and not run all that data over the ethernet network.