| The Adomo home: back to the future, with Linux |
Rick Lehrbaum (June 5, 2000)
Adomo wants a place in your home. Not on top of your TV, or as a firewall or gateway hiding in a closet. What Adomo wants, is to fill your home with a network of low-cost, easy-to-use information appliances. All over the place. And they will all have Linux inside.
Adomo's goal is to transcend the boundaries of the PC revolution, by making home information appliances as easy to use -- and ubiquitous -- as microwave ovens. And in doing so, they intend to depart from some prevailing conventions. Instead of simply sticking with popular notions of the roles of PCs, gateways, firewalls, and set-top boxes in homes of the '00s, Adomo began with a clean slate, asking: "What do family members really want?"
"Adomo is redefining the way families use information in the home," proclaims a statement on the company's website. "Imagine if all your important information . . . addresses, phone numbers, calendar, birthdays, music were always there, where you were . . . available at the touch of a button. Information could adapt to our lives, not the other way around."
"What we're trying to provide, is a turnkey solution for the home," says Adomo CEO Samir Lehaff. "We started Adomo because we didn't like the way existing computer systems work, especially in the home. Our mission is to rethink the way information can be used by families and then bring technology to bear in a sensible manner. Our goal is to create a platform for a home information system that will be elegant in its simplicity and limitless in its expandability."
Creating a unique architecture
The quest to redefine the home computer environment led Adomo to a product architecture that runs counter, in many ways, to today's personal computing paradigm. Contrary to the popular notion that intelligent interconnected appliances are the wave of the future, Adomo went with an approach more akin to the "pre-PC" multi-user computers and dumb terminals of 25 years ago. Dumb idea? Not necessarily!
Let's take a closer look. Here's a diagram of the Adomo approach to a home information system architecture:
Basically, Adomo's home system architecture leverages the synergy of four key technologies:- wireless networking
- affordable multitasking operating systems (Linux)
- the Internet
- system-on-chip computer technology
The idea is this: create a home network consisting of a central resource for computing, information storage, and Internet access, plus multiple wirelessly-linked user interface devices distributed throughout the home. Although the user interface devices function as information appliances, they don't actually execute any of the application programs internally -- they just pass data back and forth to the central resource.
If you remember desktop computing from two (or more) decades ago, this "pre-PC" approach may seem hauntingly familiar. It's basically the client/server architecture of yesterday's mainframes and terminals. Only today, key technology advancements make for some important differences. Today, for example, high speed networks give seemingly instant access to massive amounts of computing power and vast quantities of data. In other words, as Sun puts it, "the network is the computer". In that case, the distinction between server and client becomes moot!
In short, the client devices become simplified to the point where they are merely specialized interface terminals, not computers. Now, context changes -- between family members, or between OFF and ON -- can be virtually instantaneous. By contrast, "traditional" PC-like devices have too much going on inside to support such rapid state changes. Who wants to wait half a minute (or longer) for a microwave oven boot up, or to log onto a system after another family member logs off? Adomo calls the ideal home, a locale of drive-by computing!
Thin is in
Adomo's approach to post-PC information appliances might thus be encapsulated in three words: keep it thin. "As thin as possible", says Adomo CEO Samir Lehaff. "We don't believe in having one general purpose platform that performs everything," says Lehaff. "Ideally, we'd like to have 'one button' dedicated devices distributed throughout the home."
Why? By keeping the appliances simple, they can be smaller and less costly to build, and they generate less heat and run longer on a battery charge. In addition, having the application software run on a central server instead of on the appliance has some important advantages. Since the appliance is just an interface to the server, all the appliances can be used interchangeably. Just sign on and pick up where you left off.
With this approach, the CPU in the appliance doesn't need to be capable of running sophisticated programs. In fact, its only purpose is to manage the input/output functions of the device. Each appliance runs just one small program: a special small-footprint version of X Windows. Using this approach, all application programs execute on the server, and only display output (graphics, sound) and user input (keyboard/mouse, sound) travels back and forth between the server and client devices.
Of course, for the Adomo scheme to work, the central server must be powerful enough to handle the activities of all the client devices located throughout the home. In addition, the wireless network needs sufficient bandwidth to carry all the associated data transfers. At present, Adomo believes the performance of their server device will support between four and eight "typical" family members, all using the system at once.
Does that include teenagers playing the latest video games? Probably not, according to Adomo vice president of business development, Marc Prioleau. "In that case," says Prioleau, "you should plan to add a conventional PC to the system or, better yet, a specialized game machine." Recognizing that many homes already have one or more PCs, Adomo plans to fully integrate PCs into their home network, with the server providing connectivity, application sharing, file storage, and backup for all the devices -- both PC and non-PC.
The Server
The server is functionally similar to a high-end PC, running Linux. But as you can see from this picture, Adomo has made an effort to make their server look more like an appliance than a PC. 
Inside, there's a custom motherboard based on an AMD mobile K6 processor. Adomo opted for a design that reduces power consumption and heat dissipation, compared with normal desktop/server PC motherboards, in order to lessen the need for noisy fans and also to improve overall system reliability.
Functions performed by the server are:- Internet gateway services and firewall
- Mail routing and storage
- File storage
- Backup services
- And remember: all application software, for client devices, runs on the server
Although the server isn't promoted as such, it's also possible to add a monitor and keyboard and use it like a desktop system -- with all the same application programs that are available to the client devices.
The Wing
The first client device from Adomo is a sleek looking unit called the Wing. Here's what it looks like . . .
The Wing offers a variety of capabilities. Hook it up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it acts like a PC. Leave those off, and connect it up to a pair of high quality speakers, and it's a wireless music system that can play Internet radio, CDs, and MP3s.
A small circuit board inside the Wing contains all the electronics required to provide its functionality. That board includes:- a 90 MHz Motorola Coldfire system-on-chip processor
- a VGA video controller (1024 x 768 pixels)
- several programmable status LEDs
- connections for infrared keyboard/mouse, PS/2 mouse, microphone, and speakers.
The wireless LAN interface consists of a PCMCIA card that plugs into a socket on the system board. By plugging in a different type of PCMCIA card, you could configure the Wing for alternate wireless technologies -- or ordinary Ethernet. A microphone and small speaker are included directly within the Wing, but jacks are provided for optional external audio in/out.
Making use of voice
One of Adomo's strategies for making the client devices "family-friendly", is to make extensive use of voice -- for both commands and data. After all, what could be more natural for family oriented systems? For example, family members will have the ability to leave each other voice messages as easily as email messages, and in much the same way.
Despite recent progress, decent quality voice recognition still requires desktop-level computing power. This would tend to limit voice recognition capabilities of low-cost information appliances. However, in Adomo's architecture, the devices need only send 10Kbps of voice to the server, because the server's high-end CPU resources are available to process and interpret the commands. That's a minor network bandwidth price to pay, in return for the ease-of-use offered by voice commands. Speech output, on the other hand, can be synthesized directly within the clients, since many system-on-chip ICs now contain built-in digital-to-analog converters.
Other devices
Don't forget that the Adomo system also supports standard PCs, of all sizes and shapes. All of Adomo's family-oriented application programs will also be implemented in PC/Windows compatible versions, so that PC users within the home can take advantage of all the same easy-to-use software -- and services -- as users of Adomo's Wing and other client devices.
Two additional client devices, currently in development, are slated for introduction early next year:- AdomoPad -- a battery operated, wireless touch screen pad that integrates a web browser and a telephone. It's intended to function a bit like a jumbo Palm Pilot. The user can sit on the couch or roam around the house while checking e-mail, browsing the web, or looking at digital photos. Here's an artist's conception of the pad:
- AdomoTune -- a MP3 outlet that connects the digital music on the server or from the Internet to a conventional stereo system. This allows digital music to be played over high quality audio equipment. The AdomoTune allows a user to select from the entire family collection by play-list, album, artists, or genre.
Asked what's coming after that, Lehaff answers "as the technology and the platform matures, we'll add more and more dedicated appliances. These could be telephony, mp3, 'webcasting', 'radiocasting' -- applications that depend on Internet as a backbone. We'll provide the appropriate devices to provide easy-to-use interface and interaction to these applications."
Benefits of Linux and open source collaboration
Why did Adomo select Linux? "On the client side, scalability, modularity, and availability of source, which allowed us to customize the OS to meet our exact requirements, were key reasons for using Linux," says Lehaff. "On the server side, Linux offered us a highly stable multi-user OS, without the usual licensing and serialization headaches associated with trying to use Windows NT in an embedded product."
The Adomo application required customizing a server OS suitable for the home environment and developing a set of hosted applications for home users. The server uses the Red Hat distribution and the Netscape Mozilla open source browser. The applications are aimed at communications, web browsing, organizing data, backup, and performing common household tasks. One such application is an MP3 music jukebox.
The client devices run a diskless X-terminal version of Linux ported to a Motorola Coldfire microprocessor. This provides an economical and versatile platform for a wide range of future devices.
One of the interesting advantages of the clients' not containing their own software, is that there is virtually nothing that can go wrong with them, from a software perspective. All they need to do, is be capable of loading their software via the wireless LAN. That, coupled with their inherent electronic simplicity, means the devices are likely to be free from maintenance and administration. All the software for the entire home system will be concentrated on the server, which can be maintained and upgraded via its Internet connection.
Adomo's embedded Linux development benefited greatly from collaboration with the open source community. For example . . .- The client devices are based on Motorola Coldfire processors. Adomo was able to take advantage of uCLinux, but had to grow uCLinux from its normal headless "network box" configuration into a full-fledged X-terminal implementation -- while still maintaining a small memory footprint. For assistance with that task, Adomo turned to embedded Linux experts at Moreton Bay (now a Lineo company).
- SuSE provided some important help in implementing a truly embeddable X server (on the client devices). This took the form of Tiny-X, a reduced-footprint implementation of the X Window System that requires less than 800KB of memory to run.
- The client devices do not have any program storage memory, other than a small ROM used for bootstrap load. Instead, they boot remotely, via the wireless LAN. Consequently, one of the more interesting tasks was coming up with a reliable way to boot diskless terminals over a network. To tackle this problem, Adomo worked with the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) team.
How "open" is it?
Will Adomo allow third-party developers or even users to modify how the system operates? "Absolutely!" says Lehaff. The company plans to post all its embedded Linux technology, as GPL, on the Adomo website. Given that the devices don't actually contain any application software, and even boot their embedded Linux from the server, customizing the operation of the Adomo devices is completely possible -- even encouraged.
Also, since the communications protocols will be fully disclosed, Adomo expects to see third-party devices that work within the Adomo home network environment.
Production plans
Adomo plans to launch its products in October, 2000, with production ramp-up in time for the 2000 holiday season. Lehaff describes the target market as "technology friendly families who are faced with organizing and networking a growing number of Internet connected devices in the home."
About Adomo
Adomo, Inc. is developing a new platform for home information management using a centralized server and distributed devices. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has a European office in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information, visit Adomo's web site at www.adomo.com. Adomo is a privately held, venture-funded company.
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