So, assuming for the moment that I take the technically simpler route of asking everyone to buy two objects, a gateway and their desired device.

What will this gateway look like? Will it be a functional device too? Or just a black box? I would much prefer it to be a device. However, this would mean either that everyone is forced to own a single type of device (say an orb or similar) in addition to the device they actually wanted, or I have to offer every device in both gateway and plain form.

Erica suggests some sort of modular system, either internal, allowing all devices to be either gateways or end devices, or external, allowing the modular element to plug into the device.

In the latter scenario, one could, for example, have a little box which has a power connector, an ethernet jack, and one or more mini USB jacks. And all standard devices have a mini-USB connector. So they can either be connected to the PC directly, or to the gateway hub, or to a simple power supply with a mini USB connector, like a cell phone works.

I see that here too I have the same type of problem: how does a device know whether it is a router or a coordinator? How do multiple devices on the USB bus, for example, decide which should be the coordinator for any radio traffic? How does the main system find directly connected devices on the USB bus?

I think this is all far too expensive and complicated. I think that I can fairly easily support both local and global systems, if I simply design around a gateway.

OK. So next, what does this gateway look like? Is it pretty? One idea I had was a white plastic cartoon cloud, like a lamp in the kid’s dept. at Ikea. And it has a single high-brightness RGB LED in it. And it has a knob, which allows the user to configure it. Or it doesn’t have a knob, and the user must configure it from the internet or wherever their control system lives.

Lamp

If it has a knob, perhaps it has the features of the RGB lamp I designed some time ago: the knob is the sole input device to the system. The system can be used as either a simple lamp, or as a network feedback device. In lamp mode, the knob is used to set the rate at which colors cycle through the display. This allows the user to speed up the rate until the desired color comes around, then turn the rate down to zero to freeze that color. The knob might have a detent switch too, which allows the user to turn the lamp off. This is a nice system but it has the basic problem that it controls color, not intensity. Also, in my initial configurations I didn’t include white, which this lamp should somewhere in the spectrum.

Wall lamp

I imagine that this device could hang on the wall behind your desk, for best radio function, or could also sit on your desk. So I guess it is pretty 3D, and has a fairly small footprint. Or, it is shaped such that though flat, for good wall hanging, when on a desk it sits upright still. Some combo shape.

Prox sensitive

I could pull in my PSI lamp idea, and use the Sharp sensor(s) to create proximity control. I could use PIR. I could use simple reflective IR instead of the complex Sharp systems. I could use multiple points of IR reflection, so that the user controls the system by hand placement. Or, all this is too complicated. Maybe the system just gets configured through the network. But isn’t this against one of the basic principles of the aiosphere?

Multiple RGB points

Another idea I had was, instead of being a lamp, the cloud-shaped device has multiple (say ten) RGB LEDs. These could be controlled programmatically from the network. Such a system could be used to display a clock (by using one color for hours and one for minutes and optionally a third for five-second increments), but might also be used to display basic network information. If there were an RGB LED in the middle as well, then the system could use that LED to represent the gateway, and the others to represent wireless nodes. Colors could change to represent data passing through the system. But do people care about such a visualization? Not sure. But does it matter? It is possible that the system could simply present an array of LEDs, and the user could select a driver which makes it function as they desire.

But I think possibly this an aio, not a gateway. Maybe I will make the gateway much simpler. Maybe it has no UI features at all, save a single RGB LED which can be used to show network traffic, but can also be turned off by the user if they don’t want blinking. OK, then maybe the minimum gateway object is an orb? Or maybe the minimum object is nothing but a reasoably good-looking totemic object, like a green pyramid or something. Maybe it is just about shape, not light or interesting function.