Sunday, September 17, 2006

The Wonders of Wireless


I was looking under my computer the other day and noticed that, although it has 2 forms of wireless communication, it still has a boat load of wires. Here, look for yourself.



See, that's a lot of wires. So I decided to figure out what all those wires were doing, you know, sort of map it out. Oh, I knew what each wire was for when I added it to the heap, but after a while, it's gotten to be a bit of a mess. So I sat down on the old Mac (see previous post), launched a CAD program, drew out each wire. Here's my diagram. You can click on it to see a bigger version.



You'll notice from looking at the legend on the right, that not only are there a lot of wires, there are a lot of different things being carried on those wires, in lots of different ways and with different protocols.

First there's the power. The power is AC, 110V at 60 Hz coming out of the wall. From there, it goes to the surge protector into which lots of things are plugged, including a power strip. Most of the things that are plugged in are those nasty little transformer boxes that Martha Stewart was complaining about at the last SONY shareholders meeting. These convert the AC (alternating current) into DC (direct current) and drop the voltage down to about 12 V in the process. Everything, except the monitor, has a little box.

Next comes the USB 2.0 wires. USB 2.0 is a protocol for plugging things into your computer. It's a very common protocol and is used to connect the printer and the TV (yes, my computer has a TV) to the computer. A USB 2.0 line runs to the monitor which acts as a hub for even more USB things including the mouse and the camera and ipods when needed. When USB 2.0 came along, it replaced the much slower USB 1.0 and allowed USB to be used for many more things.

Next is the cable TV line. The cable presents all sorts of goodies over one line and the devices on the end suck out the part they need. We get TV, internet and phone over the cable in our house. Time-Warner gets a big check every month. So the cable comes into a splitter. One line goes to the TV tuner, which sucks out the TV signal. The other line goes to the cable modem which sucks out the internet and the phone and sends them separate ways. The internet protocol is called TCP/IP. Guess what IP stands for? The phone protocol is called VOIP or voice over IP, which, I think is a subset of TCP/IP. The TV signal is just a big nasty analog signal which the TV tuner splits out into the various channels.

OK, next in line is the FireWire cable that connects to an old 80G external hard drive. FireWire was introduced by Apple a number of years ago for fast data transfer. It made streaming of video straight from your didital camcorder to your computer possible. SONY uses it with its camcorders and calls it something else (iSight?). Nerds call it IEEE 1394. It almost made it big until USB 2.0, which is almost as fast, came along. It's slowly going away, but you have to admit, "FireWire" is a cool name.

Next in line is Ethernet. The cable modem takes the cable signal and sucks out the internet and sends it to the wireless router with an ethernet wire. The protocol is still TCP/IP. The router then sends the internet out over more ethernet wires to the old Mac, the new Mac, and the 40G Snap Server. The router also sends the internet out in other ways which I'll mention later. All the wires and wireless communication on this side of the cable modem is handled by the router and is called a LAN, or Local Area Network.

No modern electronic equipment would be complete without shipping around some sound and so there is an analog audio signal going to the headphones and one going from the old analog camcorder to the digitizing box which also happens to be the TV tuner mentioned earlier. I need to buy some better speakers for this setup. Of course that would mean more wires.

You have to get the lovely graphics out of the computer to the monitor and there is a cable to do that. I think it's called DVI or something. It has a complex looking plug with lots of thingys in it. It runs from the computer to the monitor and is, by far, the fattest wire of the bunch.

I mentioned earlier that we get our telephone out of the cable line. The cable modem converts the digital info from the cable into analog and sends it into a box connected to our old analog phone system. There's a little splitter box so that I can run a phone connection back to our printer, which also happens to be a FAX machine and therefore needs a phone line.

The reason that I started talking about all this is that I was stuck by the irony of having so many wires in the face of wireless technology. Well, this is the other thing that the router does. Using a protocol called 802.11g, it send out information embedding the TCP/IP protocol in radio waves. That way, my wife can sit downstairs and get to the internet (and play on-line poker) without having to run an ethernet cable down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the family room. My son can also connect when he comes home from college without wires. This 802.11g is better known as WiFi. It's the stuff you can also get at StarBucks. Ain't wireless great!!

USB 2.0 is a great way to do wires, but for some types of short range communication, there is another wireless protocol called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is actually the name of some sea god, but it's been stolen to describe this short range protocol used for peripherals. My keyboard communicates with the computer via BlueTooth. I also had a BlueTooth mouse but it weighed so much that I switched it out for a cheap lightweight multibuttoned USB mouse. Bluetooth is slowly taking over USB for some peripherals. You'll see phones advertised on TV as having BlueTooth that let you suck calendars and addresses and phone numbers and songs off your computer without having to find the right wire.

And last on my list is the analog video signal coming from the old camcorder to the digitizer in the TV box. This is so I can convert all my old camcorder movies to digital to save for posterity. When I get through digitizing the 8mm tapes, I'll move on to the even older VCR camcorder tapes.

So there you have it -- The wires in my life and why they are all important to me. Thanks for paying attention.

Finally, here's a dynamic picture of my wires so you can watch each one being added. I think you have to click on it to see it in action.

1 comment:

Robin said...

Carolyn Murray and Robin Murray say: Hi and we didn't even read this one. See you soon. Did you get the invite to Daddy's party? I love your picture on your profile and we did love the cat blog.