Could C bus come up with this

Would it be possible /practical , whatever, to have a hand held controller similar in size perhaps to a mobile phone . This would be tethered (not wireless -so it would not walk) and be wall mounted at convenient places -say next to beds or near lounge chairs.
It would be multi functional and could be used as an intercom, closed circuit image viewer (ie front door or nursery) , and multi faceted controller via the keypad (dialler). Am I blowing in the wind here or can anybody else see the value in such a device. Pardon my ignorance if such a thing exists -does it?

 

Sounds like a B&W C-Touch with audio and video.
No, I don't think it exists (yet).

The audio could probably be achieved quite easily with C-Bus, either by compressing an audio stream and sending it as packets over C-Bus (probably not practical), or by making use of the other pairs of the 4 pair cable.

Video may also be possible, but only by using other pairs in the cable. Getting the video from the cable to the C-Touch screen would be a challenge, and to my knowledge is not within the capabilities of the technology currently used (though I may be wrong here).

The 'spare' pairs of the cable are currently being used for remote override functions, but I suppose in a special installation, an isolation box and careful wiring could ensure that additional functions could be added.

 

Why not use a mobile phone?

Any device capable of displaying a web page, which these days is your typical 3G phone or palm top computer or PS2 type thing, could be set up to provide the functions you describe by programming them as a front end for whatever underlying automation platform you are using. Making this happen with CBus would be a combination of having a techy setup your CBus system, then having an IT person setup your mobile screen web enabled device to connect to it.

The only thing is, it wouldn't have a wire. Perhaps you could counter the problem of it walking by selecting a mobile device which has GPS built in, then you could have a program ask the device where it is....beam me up scotty..

 

A few things:

A tether does not necessarily need to be the communication cable, nothing wrong with just using some nylon cord (and it would probably be better off NOT being the data cable anyway, far less chance of damage in high-use environments)

Using existing wireless devices, even if they were modified to be "tied down", would mean that if the device needed to be moved later, it would not need to have any wiring in the walls altered, simly unscrew the "wall plate" end of the tether, and re-screw in its new location.

If you are willing to pay someone the necessary $$$ to program a back-end server to talk with the mobile, hand-held device, and someone else who could build the back-end hardware to interface to all the systems you want to involve, then there is nothing to stop you achieving what you're wanting to do.

As Steve said, most decent PDA's, Higher-end mobile phones with wi-fi capability, and several other hand-held wireless multi-media devices have the front-end hardware and software necessary to integrate into a suitable back-end system.

But be cautious, as something like this would not be cheap to implement, and would almost certainly require a PC-based server in a cupboard somewhere to handle the back-end stuff, unless you plan to sell thousands of them and have an electronic engineer come up with a dedicated box of hardware that could do all the functions that you want, but this would most likely be even more expensive than just using a PC.

You could possibly use existing hardware and software and get a good programmer to lay an interface over the top of it all for display on the remote device, but this would not be an ideal solution. Hell, if you were serious enough about it, and you planned to sell enough of the systems, you could just buy a developer kit for a PDA or phone or whatever, and have a VERY VERY smart person re-write an entirely new source code (in other words, operating system) for the device, so that it was a dedicated unit for the system you want to implment, but now we're talking mega-bucks

 

Thanks for all your suggestions. I was hoping that this sort of thing might exist or could easily be produced. I certinly am not about to go into production myself
If not Clipsal does anybody else want to attempt it?