Specific Ideas from Eric

These ideas relate to use cases, architecture, implementation, and other aspects. They are here as they are pre-mature for our stage in the development process.

Architecture

I am REALLY favoring a distributed system based on the network. It could become a centralized system in some cases. All it does is reuse existing architecture and make devices smart enough to communicate with the computers. It would be very extensible.

General idea:

• smart devices
  • network savvy - all can communicate with each other on the local home network (802.11, ethernet)
  • Zeroconf would be the discovery mechanism
    • it uses multicast packets to deliver enough information onto the local network to allow devices to connect to each other
  • one TCP/IP protocol would be the main communication medium
    • we would want to create a simple "remote control" protocol (based on SNMP or HTTP?)
    • we might use SNMP - using it would not require the zeroconf mechanism (I think)
• dumb devices
  • these devices should be able to be manufactured cheaply
  • not network savvy
  • would be connected to a smart device and use a simple protocol for communication
  • the smart device would publish the dumb device's information onto the network
• when you only have one smart device (computer), then it would be centralized - otherwise it would be distributed

• You would have smart devices that were similar to access points
  • they could connect to dumb devices using any means (serial cable, USB, Bluetooth, Firewire, etc.)
• All devices could implement more protocols and could share their features with Zeroconf
  • devices could then communicate with each other in whatever protocol they wanted (makes it extensible)