Motorized blinds, choreographed home theaters, whole-house lighting displays… Such are the premium lifestyle amenities we’ve come to associate with the connected home. Proprietary high-end communications networks from Crestron, AMX, Elan Home Systems, and Vantage Controls have been pampering the luxury homeowner for years, managing everything from lighting to music to security systems via slick keypads or touchscreen panels.
But try to have the system integrator program the microwave oven or the clock radio into the equation, and it’s far more trouble—and programming cost—than it’s worth. The everyday household appliance has largely been left out of the connected home picture.
That’s changing, and the Internet is the enabler. Using standard household wiring and the simple programming powers of the PC, Salton is bringing to market a line of appliances that can tap the powers of the Internet and a home network to bring smart capabilities to everyday appliances.
Salton already sources the Icebox, a high-end entertainment center for the kitchen combining a flat-screen LCD TV, DVD player, radio, and Web browser. Icebox has a video input for a camera to keep tabs on the baby’s room or the front door from the kitchen TV. The system comes with a washable keyboard and a mounting rack that enables the screen to tuck beneath cabinets when not in use. The upscale TV system is sold by systems integrators.
Beyond is the next stage in Salton’s vision for the connected home, and it moves the notion of networking to the mainstream. The company’s portfolio of brands covers popular names including Toastmaster, George Foreman, Melitta, and Westinghouse, and the latter will carry the additional Beyond logo when four Westinghouse Beyond products ship this summer. The appliances incorporate EasyPlug, a networking technology that uses standard AC wiring to carry voice and data as well as power.
Beyond products communicate with a souped-up clock radio called Home Hub that does double duty as control center of the appliance network. In networking jargon, Home Hub is a residential gateway, although the oval-shaped radio resides on the night table next to the master bed rather than in a utility closet in the basement. The Home Hub communicates with other Beyond devices in the home over the power line and taps into the Internet for simple PC-based programming. The only visual clues that the 8-inch-tall Home Hub isn’t a conventional clock radio are the display and the RJ-45 and RJ-11 phone jacks on the back. The system works with dial-up and broadband connections.
Salton’s vision is that the Beyond line will change how homeowners use everyday appliances, according to Robert Lamson, senior vice president of Beyond products. The product concept is practical rather than glitzy. “We’re not trying to change people’s lives,” he says. “So many high-tech products fail because they’re trying to change people’s behavior, or their developers don’t understand the value proposition. Our idea is to let people live the same way but better.”
Better might include waking up to your favorite CD track before you transition to morning news. You can do that now with a complicated CD radio but you probably can’t program it without the owner’s manual. With Beyond, you program the clock radio on the Beyond Web site using point-and-click menus that guide you through the process. You can pick one CD track number for Wednesday’s alarm, and select a different track for Thursday. Or, you can choose different radio stations for you and your spouse at different times of the morning.
Beyond takes the clock radio well beyond the wake-up call, though. It becomes your first source of information in the morning for personalized news that you’ve selected to see on the hub’s 11-line display, which is about the size of a large personal digital assistant (PDA). When you set up your account you plug in your ZIP code, which determines the weather forecast and local news you receive. The Web site also lists radio stations in your area, making programming almost as simple as clicking on familiar call letters. From the Web site you choose the information that’s important to you, such as news headlines, sports scores, weather, and your stock portfolio. Since the Beyond line is built on the Windows CE.Net operating system, the Home Hub will soon also be able to synchronize with Outlook, allowing you to bring up the day’s schedule and to-do list, too.
During the middle of the night Home Hub makes a local phone call to Beyond’s smart server, identifies itself and gets updated information. It also syncs itself with the U.S. Naval Observatory Atomic Clock in Colorado so that it always has the correct time.
The other Beyond products making their debut this summer include a Westinghouse Beyond-branded microwave oven, bread machine, and coffee maker. When you plug them in, they identify themselves to the Home Hub and are automatically added to the network. Their clocks automatically synchronize with the Home Hub clock. When it’s time to jump ahead for daylight-saving time, all appliances on the network set themselves.
All the appliances can take advantage of the networking resources of the Internet. The microwave oven comes with a scanning wand that reads the UPC and EAN13 codes from a food package. When you scan the package for microwave popcorn, the oven matches the code to its internal database of cooking instructions and cooks the popcorn perfectly, based on testing Salton has done for thousands of foods in its test kitchen.
“That’s the magic,” says Charles Williamson, Beyond product manager, “because microwave ovens are different. Directions that say ‘cook on high for 2-5 minutes’ tell you basically nothing. [Our system] tells you precisely to the second how long to cook it.” As new foods come out, Salton stuffs those codes into the database and they are automatically added to the microwave oven’s cache of recipes via the Internet connection. “We call it a living database,” Williamson says. “We include everything that makes sense to cook in a microwave.”
The bread maker offers similar functionality. Because the appliance has its own clock that automatically sets when you plug it in, you can awaken to the smell of warm bread simply by programming the time you want your bread to be finished. The bread machine also has its own bar code scanner, which determines which cooking cycle is correct for a particular bread or cake mix.
The Home Hub ($499), microwave oven ($179), coffee maker ($99), and bread machine ($179) will be available from electronics retailers this summer. Accessing the Beyond network will carry a modest subscription fee as well: $20 per year or a $50 lifetime fee. The three appliances are just the beginning. Down the road look for health care, telephony, security, and home automation products in the Beyond line.
“None of this is really news,” Williamson says. “This is the kind of automated stuff people have been waiting for a mainstream company to provide. We have 65 or 70 million homes connected to the Internet in the U.S., and it only makes sense for a company such as ours to look at the possible features and benefits that a consumer can get out of being connected,” he says. “We’re looking at small appliances that don’t require a kitchen remodel or a second mortgage to buy into a networked system. They don’t involve the kind of commitment from the consumer that makes them concerned about buying the right thing at the right time.”
Rebecca Day specializes in writing about home electronics. She can be reached at rebecca362@aol.com.
