Home Automation and Entertainment Systems

Did you know that thanks to advances in technology, it is actually possible to monitor and control your home from a centralized location – say the living room or even your bedroom?

It all started with office automation tools – which largely did away with those noisy typewriters of the old and the huge cabinets filled with dog-eared files that were considered a standard feature in the office of the past. Today, thanks to office automation technology, an office that still keeps a typewriter would be considered ‘interesting’ while the huge file-filled cabinets of the old have largely been replaced with much smaller things, to an extend that the contents of cabinets that previously filled a whole storage cabinet can now be carried around in a pocket as in a flash disk.

Automation systems were however not about to just stop at the office. They followed us home – starting with energy saving gadgets like the washing machine that has now become a standard feature even in the humblest of homes to the microwave cookers that changed our concept of cooking – making the idea of cooking a meal without fire – which would have been considered magic a few years ago to be an everyday affair. They also include air conditioning systems that make even the stuffiest of houses a habitable place – among others. The problem with all these energy-saving gadgets, however, tended to be in control – as one still had to keep moving from room to room to switch on (and off) the various gadgets. And while automated doors that could be locked securely and quite effortlessly (electronically without even touching a mechanical key) became available a number of decades ago, one would still have to be present at the door – or at least within its electronic field to get to use these technologies. Clearly, while all these energy saving gadgets were truly a Godsend, there was always a missing link in their use as one still had to be near the gadget to use it. Practically, this meant the need for someone to be always around the house – and this was clearly not as efficient as many would have liked.

Then came home automation systems. Thanks to these home automation systems, it is not only possible to control your whole house – however big an edifice it happens to be – from a central location as first mentioned, but to even do so remotely (very far away from the home) over the Internet. The fact that remote home management through the Internet has become a possible is evidence that home automation technology has definitely come of age. Combine this with the now widely available home entertainment systems and you get the home that people in previous times would not even dare dream of – for fear of being considered out of their minds. Home entertainment gadgetry include audio systems (like the widely talked about Marantz Audio systems and Onkyo Audio systems) that take sound quality to a whole new level, video systems (like the new 3D systems that with adequate display sizes, one finds themselves unable to differentiate the images on the system and real life images) among others