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Is there a way to transmit data throughout my house without RF?
My application: I want to spread sensors and actuators in my home. Due to the nature of these things I do not need high data rates, a dozen bits per second might be well enough.
My house is very massive with concrete walls and ceilings, so RF has mostly just a one-room-range.
I thought about using the existing water pipes as acoustic audio couplers, but is there a better way?
Use powerline networking, X10, etc.
User lower frequencies which penetrate walls better than higher frequencies, such as the 433 MHz band rather than 2.4 or 5 GHz.
Drill holes, run wires, put a wireless access point in each room.
Run fiber optics or wire everywhere, connect all your sensors and devices via fiber optics or wires. Also known as (hammer) Drill, baby, drill.
If " LiFi " ever gets past the hype stage it might offer an option (you'd need to pass it through doorways, or course), but at present it looks like lots of hype, no product, though I suppose you could use the concept to roll your own system.
It would be kinda retro-cool to have speaking tubes all over the house connected to 300 baud acoustic couplers, but it might also get a little wearing (background noise-wise) unless you have really good acoustic isolation, and of course if you had the tubes in place, they'd make perfectly good conduits.
I built a Power Line Carrier (PLC) Modem as a student project some 20 years back and it worked quite well for a few kbps. I used Hyper-terminal to demonstrate data transmission to about 100 ft. That was with standard technology available 20 years back (LM1893/2893). I am sure there is much improved signal processing and electronics now. OFDM can provide robust communication and high data rates.
