Hallo John!
>a small 386/40 MHz ( top of the line, at the time ) on EVERY sewing
>machine
I think 386 is overkill for most home (and industrial) automation uses.
I just finished building a device that will emit the signals needed to
control radio-controlled clocks, i.e. some kind of a wireless network
time server. It is controlled by an 8-bit microcontroller with 36 Bytes
(that equals 0.000034332 MByte) of RAM and 1792 Bytes of Flash ROM for
programs, running at a cunning speed of 32768 Hz. That equals a
computing power of 0.008192 MIPS. Imagine that with Windows CE...
The controller costs about 5 or 6 US$.
In my opinion a good home automation system has a server in the cellar
or somewhere else. This should be a quite capable machine, as it can be
a) fileserver for MP3 audio files and for "real" computers
b) web- and mailserver (if you have a permanent internet connection)
c) controller of all household things ("SAM, make a bath of 35 deg
Celsius ready for me at 17:00, please")
d) doing voice recognition
e) even more...
and there are controllers for the hot and cold water tabs, coffee
machine, everything spread throughout the house where necessary,
including small machines playing the server-hosted audio and video
files, "real" (but not necessarily fast) computers, IR transceivers in
every room for portable equipment, computer-controlled alarm clocks...
All this is linked somehow. As i do not know very much about networking,
my suggestion is to have two networks: A fast one like Ethernet-100 for
computers, video displays and such, and a slower, simpler one like I2C
for the controller equipment.
On the software side i would suggest Linux as OS for the server,
whatever you like as OS for the computers, QNX for video players or
such, and no OS for the controllers (you really do not need an OS for
just transmitting a state via I2C...)
That's for the really automation interested people... And you need
someone to write all that software...
--
Gunnar Th�le
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