The Right Way to Customize Keypads

This post comes to us from Lisa Montgomery, Senior Editor at Electronic House and freelance home technology writer.

Being able to press one button to control multiple devices is one of the most appealing features of home automation. Creating these one-button “scenes” requires programming of the keypad’s companion home automation system, which is a fairly simple task for a trained custom electronics (CE) professional. Surprisingly, what’s often the most challenging part of a keypad design is deciding what to name each button.

Keypad buttons should be labeled in a way that makes sense to all members of the household and that best reflects the family’s personality. This can be difficult to determine right off the bat, which is why many CE pros recommend leaving the buttons blank—at least for a while. Engraving keypad buttons costs money, so why not wait until you’re absolutely sure what to inscribe before laying down the cash? Why not live with the system and the settings for a few weeks or even a month or two? You might find that the setting you thought you’d call “Morning” makes more sense as “Breakfast,” or that you’d actually like to add a few completely new scenes and buttons to the setup. Or, perhaps there are buttons that you never even touched during this introductory period. There’s no harm in this, as the only thing wasted are the cheat sheets your CE pro taped to the wall by the keypads to help you remember the function of each button.

As you begin to nail down what you like, what you don’t and what you’d change, take notes. Try out these new settings and labels for a bit, and when you’re absolutely certain, have them beautifully engraved. It’s a great way to personalize your automation system and mold it into something that’s uniquely yours. And don’t fret if a year later you’re ready for a change. Buttons can be popped off and replaced for newly engraved pieces.

Remote Monitoring: Peace of Mind on Your Next Vacation

This post comes to us from Lisa Montgomery, Senior Editor at Electronic House and freelance home technology writer.

You’ve hit the road with the family for the annual summer vacation. You can’t help but feel apprehensive about the well-being of your house and property while you’re away. Thanks to innovative home technology, your worries can be over. Equipped with Internet-friendly surveillance cameras and a control system, your house can keep you apprised of everything from a busted pipe in the basement and trespassers in the backyard, to the status of the thermostats and light switches. All you need with you is your smartphone with a WiFi or 3G/4G connection, and you can monitor and manage your home from miles away as easily as if you were there.

An automation system and surveillance cameras can be set up to alert you to certain conditions via a text or email message. From your phone you can log into the system to confirm the validity of the alert, and better yet, respond appropriately to it. For example, if your system has texted “Motion at the front door,” you can access the outdoor surveillance camera and view the front door remotely on the screen of your touch screen. If you see that it’s a friend who has stopped by to pick up your mail, you can unlock the door to let him/her in, then lock it back up after they leave. Should you see the weather back home has become outrageously hot and dry, you can tap into your home control system remotely to adjust the thermostats to protect the plants and activate the sprinkler system to keep the grass healthy and green during your absence.

With remote access to the electronic systems in your house, you’ll have the peace of mind to truly relax during your well-deserved vacation. So grab a towel, sunscreen and your smartphone and hit the beach. Your automation system and linked-in surveillance cameras have everything under control back home.

Check out how this killer vacation pad in Bal Harbour, Florida, is outfitted with home technology to allow the owner to check in, at any time, from his primary residence in France: The French Connection

WTF Just Happened: My New HDTV Makes Movies Look Unnaturally Smooth

This post brought to you by Jim Merithew/WIRED

You just bought a brand-new TV, but instead of being blown away by the picture you’re starting to think it actually makes everything look worse. Well, maybe worseis the wrong word. Unnaturally smooth is more like it. Movies don’t look like movies; they look like they were shot on a camcorder. Why is your TV fixing what ain’t broke?

This annoying little phenomenon is commonly referred to as the “soap opera effect,” and it’s a byproduct of your TV’s motion-enhancing features. Thankfully, the effect can be turned off, and that’s probably a good idea when you’re watching movies. While these smoothing features can make a few things look better—scrolling tickers, sports, and HDTV test discs, for example—our eyes and brains expect something very different when we’re watching movies. A slower frame rate is one of them.

Nearly every motion picture since the dawn of talkies has been shot at a frame rate of 24fps (24p), a standard that has survived the film-to-digital transition. Many TV shows are shot at 24fps nowadays. But that 24fps rate is at odds with the way TV stations broadcast content and the way TVs display that content. Right off the bat, 24p film or video has to be modified a bit to display properly when it’s broadcast.

For broadcast TV, video is delivered to your set at a rate of 60 “fields” per second. One field can represent an interlaced mash-up of two frames so that motion appears more fluid. Until recently, all TVs had a standard refresh rate of 60Hz to match up perfectly with the rate at which that stream feeds into your set. But newer LCD/LED sets often advertise a 120Hz or 240Hz refresh rate to help combat motion blur (more on that in a bit).

With 24p content, the film has to be scanned or the digital video has to be modified to look right on TV. That’s because 24 frames don’t fit evenly into those 60 fields. With 30p content, the frames can be interlaced to create a 60i stream or displayed twice each to achieve the 60-fields-per-second rate. But if 24fps content were played at 30fps, the on-screen motion would appear 25 percent faster—and if the audio kept pace, everyone would sound like a helium addict. If frames were dropped to 20fps, which fits more nicely into 60, the video would look too choppy. So instead, every four frames of 24p source content is turned into five frames using a process called 2:3 pulldown.

When this modified video is viewed on a TV, the content has been adjusted by creating two interlaced fields that combine adjacent frames in every five-field batch. It essentially turns 24p video into 30fps video, which is more compatible with the way TVs and broadcast systems work.

None of that is what causes the distracting too-smooth effect. However, it does mean that 24p content broadcast on TV already looks a bit different from what the director intended. What really takes it into soap-opera land is when a modern set’s motion-smoothing features are enabled.

If you bought a mid- to high-end LED/LCD TV in the last few years, it certainly has these features built in. I’m focusing on LED/LCD sets here, because plasma sets are all but dead and OLED sets are still rare. LED/LCD TVs often have these motion features due to the panel technology’s traditional problems with motion blur.

If your set is a 120Hz or 240Hz one, it adds faux frames to source content if motion-smoothing settings are turned on. The higher refresh rate means the panel can show many more new images per second—even if those images aren’t in the original content—in order to make everything look more smooth. These additional frames are completely made-up: There’s enough processing power in a modern TV to analyze successive frames, create fake “interpolated” frames that split the difference between them, and display them between real frames.

So let’s say you’re watching a movie on cable with all your TV’s motion-fanciness settings turned on. In this scenario, you’re watching a movie that started out at 24fps, was modified with hybrid frames to make it more broadcast-friendly, and is now at the point where there may be more fake frames than real frames in what you’re watching. Depending on your TV’s refresh rate and the frame rate of the source content, these motion features can add two to four times as many frames to the original video.

But just as a 120Hz or 240Hz TV can make movies look less like movies, it can also be the ultimate screen for watching 24p content as intended. If you’re watching a movie on Blu-ray, make sure your Blu-ray player is set to a 24p output mode and all those motion settings are turned off on your TV. This should make your TV show each frame of your 24p content 5 times per second on a 120Hz set or 10 times per second on a 240Hz TV. As for the other aesthetic qualities of watching movies on TV, using the set’s Movie mode, Cinema mode, Film mode, or THX mode (if your set has it) usually works best.