Holy high-tech! Concert films in the Bat Cave
By Dean Takahashi
Knight Ridder News Service
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dave Fraser wanted a digital home, but not just for show. So the Oakland resident remodeled his house two years ago with technology that could fit the non-geek lifestyle of his wife Ellen and their baby daughters Claire and Katie.
Fraser rewired the house so that every room would have Ethernet cables for accessing the Internet at high speed, as well as cable TV and phone access. With that in place, Fraser spent about $15,000 on technology that made his home into something from the Jetsons.
"We wanted ubiquitous access to entertainment and communications in every room," he said. "It's not 'Blade Runner' or Internet toasters, just what we can use."
Adds Ellen Fraser: "When Dave was developing this, we had to decide what would be a pain to deal with. You don't see a lot of tech stuff around here."
A walk through the home shows the technology is well hidden. At the mailbox, you can't see it but there is a sensor that rings a chime over the house speakers whenever the mail arrives. Ellen likes it because the chime uses her husband's voice.
At the front door, a tiny Channel Vision video camera in the doorbell beams a picture to a wall-mounted TV display in the kitchen. In the kitchen, Ellen uses an older Pentium II IBM Thinkpad laptop to connect to the Internet via a digital subscriber line, which gives her high-speed access over a phone line. There is no office PC. The TV display can also show video on different channels of the kids sleeping in rooms upstairs.
On the walls are some unobtrusive controls that look like heating controls. But the control pads let the Frasers control the lighting in different rooms and select MP3 music tracks to play in any room. With one touch, they can pick baby lullaby or party music playlists that play from speakers hidden within the walls in different rooms, select pre-set lighting for moods such as cooking or entertaining, check the security system or adjust the heater.
The sound system accesses 5,000 MP3 tracks, which replaced a collection of 600 compact discs and which are stored on a hard drive hidden in a basement alcove. This saves the living room from being crowded with stereo equipment. There is a manual override for every device.
Besides the wall-mounted control pads, Fraser can also control the house with his laptop or with an Axim X5 handheld computer from Dell that is wirelessly connected to a WiFi access point in the kitchen. WiFi lets Fraser add new devices without cluttering up the house with new wires.
In the living room, the Frasers have a 32-inch TV hooked to a DirecTV satellite dish. The TV is connected to a TiVo digital video recorder from Sony in the basement alcove. They can watch TV or listen to CDs casually on the couch, but for serious entertaining they go downstairs. Next to the TV is a Roomba, a disc-shaped robot vacuum cleaner that, left to itself, will automatically vacuum the whole house.
The basement alcove is the nexus where all the ugly wires meet. There, Fraser has a cabinet; inside are two computers that store music and movies, as well as a Kustom audio distribution box that can send six different streams of music to six different areas in the house, and an HomeVision X-10 box that is hooked into the heating, security, mail box sensor and lighting systems.
Fraser calls his basement "The Bat Cave."
The room has two rows of red sofas, with the back row raised from the floor for better viewing. The main attraction is a projection screen 10 feet wide with 5.1 channel THX sound, the heart of the home theater. Instead of spending a lot more money on a big-screen TV, Fraser opted for a $2,500 NEC LT150 ceiling front projector hooked to an $800 computer, which can also be used to surf the Web or play games. Fraser can play DVD movies with a 1024 x 768 resolution from a PC in the alcove and control the screen with a wireless mouse and keyboard.
"It's great for watching concert films," says Fraser as he watches the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense" film. When he is ready to go to sleep, Fraser clicks on the "Bat Cave Off" icon on his computer and all the equipment in the room and the lights turn off.
