Smart Home Blog

The new alpha of LinuxMCE 0810 was released yesterday. The third one. The installation procedure is not changed. You still should have the Kubuntu 8.10 installed on your PC. Then alpha2 installer will download and install LinuxMCE 0810. Just follow that simple instructions.

According to 0810 alpha wiki page a lot of bugs was fixed since alpha 1 and 2. So, if you’d like participate to LinuxMCE by fixing bugs or just submitting bugreports fell free to install Alpha3. But note that this is still alpha version and it can be unstable. So, do not use it in production systems!

I already wrote about using compact keyboard with mouse pad Logitech diNovo with MythTV. Now it’s time to use it to control your LinuxMCE core/hybrid or media director. Media buttons work out of the box. But to activate mouse pad just add following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/options:
options usbhid quirks=0x046d:0xc71f:0x00080000

After reboot enjoy that cool keyboard!

In addition to Z-Wave LinuxMCE 0810 will ship with interface to the EnOcean. EnOcean devices use proprietary and non standard wireless protocol (non either Z-Wave or ZigBee). But they have a few good advantages like compact size, low energy consumption and they are self powered! The EnOcean devices take power using solar cells, motion, thermal, rotation or vibration converter.

The new interface – EnOcean_TCM120 uses TCM120 as gateway to communicate with sensors, switches, dimmers. The interface is based on the EnOcean LGPL library. If you can’t wait 0810 you may try to get the EnOcean LinuxMCE interface code from SVN repository and compile under 0710. Theoretically it should work.

After mobile Orbiter based on Java was announced I thought that Symbian Orbiter was dead. JavaMO works fine and it doesn’t need specific platform. The mobile phone just should support Java applications. There are some issues with JavaMO, but it looks much better then S60 Orbiter.

But I was wrong. Thanks to Hari, who started JavaMO development, owners of S60 v.3 smartphones can run native Orbiter on their devices. The updated version of Symbian mobile Orbiter can be downloaded here, demo video – here. Feel free to install it, test and submit found bugs and suggestions here.

UPDATE: There is the newest version of the S60 v3 Orbiter. You can find it here. The changes include hardcoded resolution to 240×320, used by many smartphones, local cache for the screens and some bugfixes.

Convergent Home Technologies based in England announced its new home automation system Dianemo. The Dianemo is based on the opensource smarthome system LinuxMCE with well tested hardware and some customizations. There is a few demo videos on the web site demonstrated all Dianemo features.

The Convergent Home Technologies engineers help a lot to grow up LinuxMCE. Full featured VDR integration, KNX/EIB interface, participation with new Z-Wave interface, sharing experience with hardware – all of this come from the Convergent Home Technologies. As result the LinuxMCE users can use that stuff for free.

I wish good like to Convergent Home Technologies with its Dianemo. Hope its customers will be happy with the system!