The wireless age is upon us, with all sorts of new devices and capabilities that you can add to your network to save you time and enhance your lifestyle. After you have your wireless local area network in place, which we show you how to do in Parts II and III, you can do a nearly unlimited number of things.
In this topic, we introduce you to some of the neater things that are available now for your wireless home network. In next topic, we talk about the things that are coming soon to a network near you!
In this topic, we give you an overview of many new products, but we can’t give much specific information about how to set up these products. In general, you have to provide your service set identifier (SSID) and WPA passphrase (or WEP key, if your network doesn’t support WPA). That should be 95 percent of what you need to do to set up your device for your wireless network.To say that your whole house will have wireless devices in every room within the next few years is not an understatement — it’s truly coming on fast (so hold on tight!).
Making a Connection to Your Car
For many people, their cars are more than mechanisms to get them from point A to point B. Some folks spend a considerable amount of time each day commuting — we know people who spend one and a half hours in the car each way in a commute. For others, like those with RVs, their vehicles represent entire vacation homes.
If you think about the things you do in your car — listen to music, talk on the phone, let your kids watch movies — they’re not all that different from things you do around the house. Because your home’s wireless connection can reach outside your walls and into your driveway or garage, your car can go online with your home network and access data ranging from your address book on your PC to your latest MP3s in your stereo. You can download them to your car, thus simplifying your life and making the car truly a second home. (No more calls home asking "Honey, can you look on my computer for the number for . . . ?")
Your car’s path to wireless enlightenment
Although you may think that wireless is a new topic for your car, your car has been wirelessly enabled for years. Your car stereo gets wireless AM/FM signals from afar and, with the advent of satellite radio, now even farther than ever. (See the nearby sidebar, "Satellite radio versus digital radio.") Wireless phone options — cellular and Bluetooth-based technologies — are quickly filtering into the car. And then there’s the new wave of electronic toll systems that predominantly use short-range wireless technology to extract from your bank account that quarter (or dollar) every time you cross a toll bridge. Wireless is all over your car, but not centralized on any sort of wireless backbone like it is for your home.
Your car is also becoming more outfitted for computing and entertainment devices and functionality as manufacturers add, as standard and optional features, such items as CD and DVD playback systems, global positioning systems (GPSes), and even computers to operate your car.
All this spells opportunity for wireless. Bluetooth and 802.11 technologies are infiltrating the car and providing you with the opportunity to create the same wireless backbone as in your home — a universal wireless network that any device or function can access to talk to other parts of the car, such as your stereo, and to points outside the car. In fact, your wireless home network plays an important part in helping consolidate and integrate your car’s wireless network with devices inside the car and to connect it with your home’s network as these two areas converge.
The response has been a flurry of activity by auto manufacturers and others to network enable cars with wireless phone, data, video, audio, and control mechanisms that resemble the same efforts going on inside your house by other consumer goods manufacturers. In fact, you’re starting to see entire product lines that include home and car wireless network products.
For years, efforts to wirelessly sync the car to other places had been going full steam ahead — that is, until the iPod came along. The iPod offers portability of entire music collections in ways that had not been seen before, and the focus shifted from trying to get music into your car wirelessly to just carrying it into the car on your iPod. We think this is a temporary swing to an extreme, and that the ideal solution is in the middle — a computer presence in the car that can reach out and synchronize with the home, and yet have connectivity to portable devices via Bluetooth, 802.11, and other technologies.
Yet portable devices (such as Zunes) aren’t going away anytime soon. The best solution is not to build a bunch of different hardwired connections into the car, but rather to build a car that can modularly accept them and make the best wireless connection for the user. At the same time, we think that network connectivity in car devices — whether it be Wi-Fi in the garage or in an "information filling station" at your local drug store, or cellular broadband data on the road — is absolutely the best way to go moving forward.
Although it’s tempting to focus on linking iPod and Zunes and cell phones to your car, we think that approach is shortsighted. So we cover both approaches, one with more of an eye to the future than the other.
Synching your car with devices in the car
By far the most common approach today to integrating music players and other content devices to the car’s audio system has been through FM transmitters — small add-on accessories that take the output from the device’s headphone jack and transmit it over an available FM frequency so your car’s stereo can be tuned into it. Simple, quick, and cheap. Whether you’re talking about an iPod, Zune, or other unit, you can find a range of FM transmitters for $10 and up. Companies such as Griffin Technology (www.griffintechnology.com) are known for their MP3 player accessories.
In the wireless realm, Parrot (www.driveblue.com) offers a number of retrofit Bluetooth-enabled music controllers that capture the music sent by your Bluetooth stereo mobile phone or MP3 player and redirect it to the vehicle’s speakers (which automatically mute anything else playing). You can scroll through the titles via a simple LCD screen that attaches to your dashboard. The Parrot MK6100, for instance, is about $250.
Satellite radio versus digital radio
Your wireless home isn’t always just about 802.11 technologies — other forms of wireless can enhance your home, and satellite radio is one of them, particularly for your car. If you’re like us, you live where there isn’t a whole lot of programming you want to listen to. Check out satellite radio, which offers a huge number of stations (more than 100) beamed to your house or car from a handful of geostationary satellites hovering above the equator. We find a ton more diverse and just plain interesting stuff coming across these space-based airwaves than we find on our local radio. Satellite radio services, from startups such as XM Radio or SIRIUS, require you to (gasp) payfor your radio (about $12.95 per month).
Check out the Web sites of the two providers (XM Radio, www.xmradio.com; and SIRIUS, www. sirius.com) to find the programming you prefer. Then, get your hands on a satellite radio tuner. (You can find a bunch of models listed on each company’s Web page.) The majority of these satellite tuners are designed for in-car use (because people tend to listen to the radio most while they’re driving), but XM Radio offers some cool tuners (from Sony and Delco) that can do double duty: You put these tuners in your car, and when you get home, pull them out and plug them into your A/V receiver or into a portable boom box.
We like the Delphi XM SkyFi3 (http:// xmradio.com/shop — click the On the Go menu, $159) which is an iPod-like portable XM receiver that can also store as much as 10 hours worth of XM content, so you can catch up on those car hack shows you missed! XM Radio has also launched a version of its service that wirelessly transmits weather conditions to a specialized receiver as well, although it’s expensive at $99 per month. (For that price, you can get a good PDA with wireless EVDO access from a carrier such as Sprint, www.sprint.com, and get all the weather plus Internet access — that’s probably a better deal.) Within the realm of affordable luxuries, XM also offers live and up-to-date traffic reports in many cities (the service works with a number of built-in and aftermarket GPS navigations systems) for $3.99 a month on top of your radio subscription.
Tip: Check out the annual pricing plans. You can save a good deal of money by paying in advance for a whole year. Also, each of these two satellite radio companies offers family plans for multiple receivers, where the price per extra receiver subscription can drop to as low as $6.99 per month — pretty good if you have lots of kids. However, Sirius and XM Radio are considering a corporate merger — if this is approved by legislators, we’re not sure what will happen to programming and pricing plans.
Now you may not want to spend the extra dollars needed to get digital satellite radio into your car. Lucky for you, a free over-the-air (broadcast from terrestrial antennas) alternative known as HD Radio (www.hdradio.com) is available. This is a local broadcast service that allows local AM and FM stations to broadcast a second channel using a newer digital radio technology. As a user, you get free reception and better audio quality (the HD Radio folks claim that FM broadcasts will sound as good as a CD, and AM broadcasts will sound as good as regular FM broadcasts). A number of car manufacturers are adding HD Radio to cars at the factory (either as a standard feature or as an option), and you can easily add HD Radio to your existing car stereo (a number of these solutions are listed on the HD Radio Web site).
HD Radio is still new, but most big cities have a dozen or more stations up and running. The great thing about HD Radio (besides the free part) is that it doesn’t interfere with traditional AM and FM stations, so having an HD Radio in your car just opens up the radio band to provide you with more stations. And the digital transmission system helps improve the transmission quality— so you’re much less likely to have the signal fade as you drive across town.
By the way, the neatest feature of HD Radio hasn’t made it to the car yet (you can also buy in-home HD Radio receivers). This feature, called iTunes Tagging, lets you press a "tag" button on your HD Radio when you hear a song you like. The tag is saved to your iPod, which is docked in the HD Radio, so the next time you’re syncing your iPod with your computer, you can purchase the song from the iTunes Store. With the increasing number of car audio systems that can dock an iPod, we expect that this feature will eventually make it into cars.
Another cool Parrot product is the RK8200 Bluetooth Car Stereo, a headend unit that replaces your current stereo in your car but has a USB port, an SD card reader, an line-in jack, an iPod connector, and A2DP Bluetooth support — note no CD player. This revolutionary product has 2GB of onboard memory (plus whatever you can add via the SD card port), enough for hundreds of songs. Even more, the faceplate comes off to reveal a compartment where you can dock your iPod or cell phone for even more accessible content. The RK8200 costs about $240.
So you have plenty of options for retrofitting your car to work with your gadgets. But what’s more interesting to us is where the new car models are taking us. Ford, for instance, has unveiled its new Bluetooth-powered Sync system, a Microsoft Auto software system that controls all sorts of in-car audio equipment. Sync is powered by a small in-dash computer running Windows Automotive, with 256MB of RAM and a 400-MHz StrongArm processor. It allows users to interface their mobile phone, music player, or digital storage device with their Ford’s audio system. The devices will be controlled by voice commands, steering-wheel mounted controls, or the car’s audio controls.
You can use the car’s audio system to read back text messages sent to portable devices. It will also synchronize your contact information from devices, and will even be able to distinguish most ring tones loaded onto mobile phones. You can even link to the car through a USB port for recharging your portable devices.
Ford first offered the Sync system on the 2008 models of Focus, Fusion, Five Hundred, Edge, Freestyle, Explorer, and Sport Trac; the Mercury Milan, Montego, and Mountaineer; and the Lincoln MKX and MKZ. Ford says it will put the system in all its future products as an optional accessory.
The move by Ford is an acknowledgment of the fast pace of the consumer products industry. Instead of trying to create a leading edge dashboard device that will be stale in a few years, they created an infrastructure that enables software upgrades remotely but also allows car owners to link their leading-edge devices into the car. Expect to see more of this approach as the car reaches out and uses other devices to bring flexibility and connectivity to the car’s audio and visual entertainment infrastructure. Ford has a year-long exclusive on this Microsoft technology in the U.S. market, and then it will be available to other manufacturers too.
Synching your car stereo with home
The major area where 802.11 is just beginning to show up is in third-party add-ons to the car — a typical precursor to manufacturers directly bundling these add-ons into the car (in-car VCRs started the same way). One example is in the A/V arena. We show in next topic how simple it is to synchronize your audio and video server across the house and over the Internet — why not with your car, too? (See Figure 14-1.)
A confluence of approaches are available, each struggling to win. Until recently, the ability to store content in the car (as opposed to on devices you take to the car, such as the iPod) has been frowned on by the same people who sue college students for downloading songs for frat parties. However, a new trend towards digital rights management (DRM) free content is making it popular again to think about having a massive hard drive in your car that synchronizes with the home whenever it’s in range.
Figure 14-1:
Linking your car with your wireless home network is a matter of having your car’s access point or wireless client log on to and sync with the wireless home network.
Our favorite product for this was the Rockford Fosgate 802.11b-based car product, Omnifi (www.omnifimedia.com), which was, sadly, sold only until late 2005. Omnifi allows you to wirelessly transfer tunes from your home PC to the car, where they can be played on your existing car stereo. The Omnifi has an installable hard drive that can store as many as 20GB of files; the home component is a stand-alone receiver capable of streaming media dispatched from the PC (see Figure 14-2). We were sorry to see this product taken off the market because it’s really the only (shipping) retrofit, auto-updating, automobile-based Wi-Fi wireless system we’ve seen. You can still find it on eBay and in various online stores.
Omnifi eliminates the legwork (the need to burn CDs or load your iPod) to listen to digital music in the car. It gives consumers the ability to download and transfer music and programs from the Internet to the PC hard drive to the consumer’s car and home stereo and theater systems — using wireless technologies. You can also subscribe to services such as audiobooks, from www.audible.com, so that you can listen to your favorite mystery book while you drive down the road. iTunes work as well. Very cool.
Other vendors say that they’re entering the marketplace, so expect your car to become a hot zone for wireless technologies soon. Delphi Corporation, a well-known brand in car electronics, has been working with several partners to bring home-car integration to the market. It has shown prototype Wi-Fi enabled devices that sync with cable set-top boxes in your living room, and is working to bring audio and video downloads to the car.
Figure 14-2:
The Omnifi system in your car!
Another manufacturer, Z-App Systems (www.zappsys.com), announced a home Wi-Fi audio system called the AL-1 in January 2007. The AL-1 (which will have a list price of $499) is the centerpiece of a family of Wi-Fi music gear. One part of this family, the MP-1, will bring your car into the Wi-Fi era by automatically synchronizing a copy of the music stored on your AL-1 onto the MP-1′s internal hard drive via the Wi-Fi connection. This system isn’t on the market yet, and we don’t even know what the price will be, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the Web site if Wi-Fi music is what you need for your car!
Other car manufacturers have likewise shown prototypes of various systems, but the Omnifi remains the only mass market product we’ve seen that’s explicitly designed for the home-car linkage. It remains your best bet, if you can find one.
If you want to build a full-fledged car computer, check out the section later in this topic, "Getting online with your own car PC."
Turning your car into a hot spot
In next topic, we talk about cellular data services that you can access with your laptop when you’re on the go — or from home if you’re sitting on the couch. With unlimited data access, you can hop on the Internet anywhere. EV-DO is a popular data service offered by companies such as Sprint (www.sprint.com) and Verizon (www.verizon.com); AT&T offers a similar service called HSDPA.
Some brainy folks thought to marry these data services with Wi-Fi to create instant Wi-Fi hot spots anywhere you want — in your car, on your boat, or in the middle of a park. New devices called wireless WAN routers (where WAN means wide area network) interface with your cellular data service on the one hand and your Wi-Fi network on the other.
There’s no one name for these routers. You can also find them as EV-DO routers, HSDPA routers, 3G routers, or wireless cellular routers — but not wireless mobile routers — these are usually just Wi-Fi travel routers. Consumer-grade versions are in the $200 to $300 range, and commercial ones can cost more than $500.
You need to get the model that is compatible with your network provider. Kyocera has an 802.11n version called the KR2 Mobile Router (www.kyocera-wireless.com, $200) that supports EV-DO services with PCMCIA, ExpressCard, and USB connections. D-Link has its 3G Mobile Router DIR-450 (www.dlink.com, $200) for EV-DO as well, but at the time of this writing it was 802.11g.
The Linksys entry is an 802.11g-based WRT54G3G model (www.linksys.com, $220). Most Wi-Fi router makers will have at least one wireless cellular router in their product line.
Be sure to check the card compatibility chart online for any wireless cellular router you purchase. It likely will not work with any card not explicitly on the list, and similar model numbers also likely will not work. Wireless cellular routers lag in support for the most recent cards, so if you buy a new card from your carrier, it might not be supported for several months.
You might want Wi-Fi in your car without all the complications of router and EV-DO service configuration. AutoNet Mobile (www.autonetmobile.com) will soon be offering a consumer-friendly EV-DO Wi-Fi service as a complete turnkey package (including the monthly EV-DO service). This self-contained unit is plug and play — AutoNet Mobile acts as your service provider and preconfigures everything so all you have to do is plug it into a DC power supply (in other words, a cigarette lighter) in your car (and pay a monthly fee) and you’re online with Wi-Fi.
AutoNet Mobile expects to launch their product/service combo to consumers some time in soon. Initially, they are selling their product only to the Avis rental car company for you to rent when you want Wi-Fi in your rental car as well as in your hotel room.
What can you do with a portable wireless router? Just about anything you want. Stick it in your car and you can have Wi-Fi access for anyone in your car — and those around you. You can even have a virtual party with the cars in front of and behind you, linked via Wi-Fi.
An enterprising guy named Mike Outmesguine decided to put one in his backpack so he could always have a hot spot wherever he went. He and his friends can play multiplayer games while sitting in the middle of a nice park, courtesy of this solar-powered portable contraption. (How’s that for trying to be the center of attention wherever you go!)
To build a Wi-Fi hot spot knapsack yourself, you need three major components: a wireless WAN router, such as the KR2 device; a cellular data PC Card, such as the Sprint EV-DO PCMCIA Card; and a Voltaic Systems solar-charging backpack or case (www.voltaicsystems.com, $200). That and about $35 of additional items from Radio Shack, and you’re ready to hit the trail wirelessly (see Figure 14-3). Check out Mike’s step-by-step Popular Science magazine article:
Figure 14-3:
A wireless WAN router, a backpack, and solar power — the mobile access point.
Getting online with your own car PC
Pretty soon, downloading audio or video to the car won’t be enough — you’ll want a full-fledged PC on board. Luckily for you, some cool, wireless-capable auto PCs are now on the market.
With a PC in your car (we don’t recall seeing any of those plastic traffic signs in any car windows saying "PC on Board" — do you?), you can mimic your wireless home network in your car, almost in its entirety. You can sync with your PC for audio and video to play over your car’s radio and video display system. You can play computer games over those same systems. You can access your address books and calendars, just like at your desk. You can use wireless keyboards. You can link to your wireless cellular router to surf the Internet.
Colloquially known as a carputer — a computer designed to be installed in a car — these small-footprint devices use less power and are better prepared for the rugged car experience. When we say small, we mean it: We’ve seen them no bigger than a paperback book. After you install one, you use a wireless keyboard, touch-screen interface, remote control, and other similar devices to run specific applications on your PC.
Carputers are definitely in the hobbyist stage, in the sense that you install one and then keep adding devices. We’ve seen setups with Wi-Fi cameras, multiplayer gaming, and other such fun stuff scattered throughout the car.
It starts with the basic unit, however, and you can find a couple of good online sources for basic parts and systems: CarCPU.com (www.carcpu.com) and MP3Car.com (www.mp3car.com). You can get additional accessories to boost your enjoyment of your car PC. A wireless keyboard makes it simple to interface with the PC for text-oriented tasks (as is common with kids’ games) and for surfing the Internet. You can wirelessly connect to the Internet while driving by using a cellular data PC Card, like the Sierra Wireless AirCard 750.
So, you can now pull up to a hot spot and log on.Or autosync when you enter your garage. It’s just a matter of time until your passengers can play games car-to-car with another wirelessly enabled car while driving down the road.
Installing your car PC is both easy and hard. It’s easy in the sense that you screw the unit to your car and run power to the unit. It’s hard in the sense that other than the wireless connections, any connections to your car stereo or video system may entail running wires, just like with the audio wireless car servers we describe earlier in this topic. After you have all this in place, though, using a different application is just a matter of installing new software on your car PC. It’s just like with your home PC: After you install your printer, monitors, and all the other parts of the system, the hard work is done. Just install new software to do new things.
What does it cost to try out a carputer? Beginner packages, which include a computer, keyboard, dashboard mountable monitor, and miscellaneous gear are less than $1,000. Then you install software from the Web; a wide range is available, from free, program-it-yourself code libraries up to full-fledged software and hardware packages like those from StreetDeck (www.streetdeck.com), which run around $2,100.
Putting a PC in your car is a fun project. Once installed, you can do all sorts of things with it. Many user interfaces replace the existing car stereo. If you need to remove your car’s stereo system to do the install, we highly recommend www.carstereohelp.com — with instructions for each car’s make and model — to find out how to safely and correctly take your dashboard apart. Also check out the wiki on car computing at MP3car.com (www.mp3car.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), where you can find a great overview of lots of resources for outfitting your car with tech gear. And the forums at MP3car.com are a great place to ask questions.
Networking your navigation system
In-car GPS navigation systems are one of the hottest areas in the consumer electronics business. Car manufacturers charge premiums of $1,000 or $2,000 (or more!) for fancy integrated navigation systems that pick up your current location (and other things such as which direction you’re heading and your speed) and use a DVD database to map your location and provide you with point-to-point driving directions, local points of interest (POI), and more.
Even more GPS navigation systems are sold as aftermarket add-ins to the car, with manufacturers such as TomTom (www.tomtom.com), Garmin (www.garmin.com), and Magellan (www.magellangps.com) each selling millions of portable GPS systems every year.
Most navigation systems are not networked in a meaningful way — yes, they pick up incoming radio signals from the GPS satellites, but they don’t have real-time communications with a network to enhance their functionality. The one exception here is the small (but growing) number of navigation systems that can pick up real-time traffic information from sources such as XM Radio (discussed earlier in the topic).
Networking navigation systems makes a lot of sense because things change. Perhaps the new shortcut road that wasn’t built when you bought your nav system has been completed (this would save you a ton of time, if only your nav system knew this and could route you accordingly), or a bridge is closed for a six-month repair period (you wouldn’t have to turn around and backtrack if only your nav system knew this), or you’re looking for a Japanese restaurant, and you’d have to drive only 3 miles instead of 12 (if only your nav system knew about the new Bento Box joint that opened up last summer). You get the picture — up-to-date information can make a navigation system much more useful.
Manufacturers are adding some networking capabilities to their nav systems in an offline way. Most portable nav systems can be plugged into your PC (via a USB cable) to receive updated maps and POI listings on a periodic basis. The folks at TomTom have taken this concept one step further in two ways:
By creating an online community called TomTom Map Share: Map Share lets you feed your real world experiences (like that bridge that’s closed) back into the user community. TomTom gathers this information and provides updated map information that can be downloaded to your nav system whenever you sync it with your PC.
By integrating with Google Maps (maps.google.com): You can search Google Maps on your PC, and with a simple button-click send that location to your TomTom navigation system. The next time you sync your nav system, the destination will be there.
These offerings from TomTom are great, but they still require you to lug the GPS system into your home to sync things, and they require you to think about your navigation needs ahead of time rather than as events occur.
A new startup company in Silicon Valley called Dash Navigation (www.dash.net) is bringing to market a two-way Internet connected navigation system called the Dash Express. Dash Express uses a combination of Wi-Fi and GPRS (a slightly slower but widely available cellular data system) to create a navigation system that’s always up-to-date wherever you are. With the two-way wireless Internet connection, the Dash Express can
Always be up-to-date: The system constantly receives updated map and POI information over the Internet connection (Wi-Fi when at home, GPRS on the road).
Tap into the gigantic database of maps and address that Yahoo! provides on the Internet: Dash Express lets you do live searches of Yahoo!’s Local Search (local.yahoo.com) from the nav unit itself. You can find POIs based on keyword searches, and even search for people’s addresses and phone numbers.
Get real-time traffic data from "feet on the street": This is perhaps the most far-out aspect of Dash Express. Dash Express systems automatically tap into a real-time traffic network that feeds your own and all other Dash users’ current location and speed information into an anonymous system that combines user data with other traffic data sources to send updated traffic info back to your nav system. Ever hear an announcer on the radio say, "the I-5 is clear throughout the county" while you’re on the I-5 stopped dead? Dash uses this real-world driver data to improve the traffic reports and keeps this from happening. (If only they could just get rid of the traffic for us!)
E-mail your nav system: Because your Dash Express is on the Internet, it has an e-mail address. Have somewhere you need to be this afternoon? Shoot your Dash an e-mail before you get in the car, and that destination will be loaded in the system waiting for you. You can even give out the e-mail address to friends, so if your buddies change the restaurant where you’re meeting them, they can send you the location while you’re on the road heading there!
As we write, Dash Express isn’t on the market, but it’s on the way. You can preorder the unit from Dash’s Web site for $599. The network subscription will add another $12.95 per month, but we think that’s a bargain considering the convenience the system will provide. (You can use Dash Express as a stand-alone, non-networked nav system without the subscription, but the real magic here is in the network connectivity.)
Are navigation systems the hub of the car?
Earlier in this topic we discuss the car PC — it’s a neat way to add a lot of information and entertainment (often called infotainment) features to your car. Of course, not everyone is ready to put a PC in their car (at least not on their own). If, however, you look at what car navigation systems can do today, you’ll see that a lot of what you might want from a car PC is easily available in today’s fancier navigation systems.
What can a nav system bring to your car? Well, of course they bring GPS-based navigation (they’d be pretty useless if they didn’t). They also bring a nice big color screen (again, a no-brainer). But what else is available in the nav-based infotainment realm? Try these features on for size:
Music servers: Many navigation systems have hard drive or flash memory systems that not only hold map and POI data but also provide room to store your own media. MP3 and other music files can be synced to your navigation system when it’s connected to your PC, and then played back in the car through an FM transmitter or auxiliary audio connection into your car stereo.
Document viewing: A number of nav systems can be uploaded with detailed travel guides, reference materials, and even dictionaries. Going on a trip? Upload a travel guide and quickly pull up a description and guide to the tourist highlights for your location!
Hands-free calling: Most nav systems, beyond the least expensive, include a Bluetooth hands-free phone system.You can leave your phone in your pocket and make and receive calls using the built-in microphone on your nav system and either a speaker built into the system or your car stereo’s speakers.
Text messaging: A few navigation systems, when connected via Bluetooth to your mobile phone, can display incoming text messages (SMS messages) on your navigation screen. Most systems don’t let you type replies (for safety reasons), but this is a great way to have your friends in the convoy to the big alumni homecoming game let you know they’re pulling over in two miles for some BBQ.
Navigation systems may also have a built-in DVD or other video player (MPEG, WMV), or even a photo viewer so you can upload pictures of the kids and have them up on the screen when you’re not actively navigating. As we’ve mentioned, a number of navigation systems can also receive traffic information broadcasts and automatically route you around the worst traffic.
What this functionality needs to become really useful is network connection that brings a live, real-time element into the equation. The Dash Express system we discuss has this built in. We suspect that other manufacturers will take advantage of the Bluetooth connection to mobile phones to add this functionality by simply taking advantage of the fast 3G connection built into many of today’s phones.
Choosing wireless gear for your car
The integration of external wireless connectivity options to cars is in its infancy. However, if you’re shopping for auto-based audio and video gear, look for the following:
PC Card (PCMCIA) slots: You get the ultimate in flexibility with PC Card slots because you can put any card you want into the system. You need these for connecting to your home when parked in the yard and accessing the Internet when traveling. Ideally, you would have two PC Card slots because it probably will be a while before many dual-mode Wi-Fi/cellular cards are on the market.
FM modulator: Some systems have an optional FM modulator that enables you to merely tune into an unused FM band in your area and broadcast your music from the server to your stereo system. Because some audio and video systems require you to have specific receivers (that is, your actual audio component where you listen to the music) for your car to make full use of the new functionality, it can get expensive to install a system. FM modulators make it easy to put in a system without changing out your stereo; you lose some of the onscreen reporting that comes with a hard-wired installation, but you still get access to the music (which is the important part). Many new iPod players use FM modulation to link to your car.
Upgradeable storage hard disk space: Look for systems that allow you to add storage space. Storage is getting cheaper and coming in smaller form factors all the time. You probably want to keep adding storage space as your audio and video collections increase.
Lots of interfaces: After your system is installed, you want to plug a number of things into it. Make sure that you have a good supply of USB, FireWire, Ethernet, PC Card, serial, and RCA ports. Also look for an SD Card interface so you can easily transfer info and add storage if you need to. You may have already installed a VHS tape deck or DVD player in your car; if you did, you may be able to easily install an audio server or a video server right beside it and use available In jacks on the video player to feed your existing screen and audio system.
All in all, expect a wireless LAN in your car soon — it just makes sense.
"Look, Ma, I’m on TV" — Video Monitoring over Wireless LANs
The heightened awareness for security has given rise to a more consumer-friendly grade of video monitoring gear for your wireless network, too — this stuff used to be the exclusive domain of security installers. You can get network-aware 802.11g videocameras that contain their own integrated Web servers, which eliminates the need to connect a camera directly to your computer. After installation, you can use the camera’s assigned Internet Protocol (IP) address on your network to gain access to the camera, view live streaming video, and make necessary changes to camera settings.
Network cameras are much more expensive than cameras you attach to your PC because they need to contain many of the elements of a PC to maintain that network connection. Expect to pay from $100 to more than $1,000 for network cameras; the more expensive versions offer pan-tilt-zoom capabilities and extra features such as two-way audio, digital zoom, and motion detection ($200 is the average price for a well-equipped camera).
D-Link is the leading vendor of wireless-based video surveillance. It has a special line of SecuriCam products designed just for surveillance, as well as a large number of other wireless and wired network camera products. Its DCS-6620G Wireless G 10x Optical Zoom Internet Camera (www.dlink.com, $700) is on the higher end of their product line (see Figure 14-4). This 802.11g camera has motorized pan-tilt-zoom (so that you can look around an area and zoom in), two-way audio support (so that you can hear people and talk to them as well), dual-motion MJPEG and MPEG-4 support (so that you can stream video using different bandwidth levels and quality), extreme low-light sensitivity (so that you can take pictures in dark rooms), and a frame capture rate of up to 30 fps. You can remotely monitor your camera using a Web-based interface or through the D-Link IP surveillance software. Your cameras can be accessed via the Web, with as many as ten simultaneous users viewing the live feed. Using the IP surveillance program, you can monitor and manage as many as 16 cameras, set recording schedules, configure motion-detection settings, and change settings to multiple cameras — all from one place.
Figure 14-4:
The D-Link SecuriCam DCS-6620G wireless network camera.
