Smart Home Blog

Nokia N810 can be a good choice to control LinuxMCE based home automation system. It’s compact and not so expensive. See the demo video below which demonstrates the Maemo Orbiter in action.

Nokia already announced the next generation of its internet tablet N900. So, I started building of LinuxMCE Orbiter for Maemo 5.

An online store with LinuxMCE compatible devices is open now. It’s planning to sell there tested hardware to help people build their own home automation system based on LinuxMCE. Currently there are no so many items. Just a few Z-Wave devices, HDHomeRun, SqueezeboxBoom, Web Pad, TV brackets and IR accessories. But the assortment will be definitely expanded. So, stay tune!

All of you who like Star Trek and want to have LCARS – Library Computer Access/Retrieval System may be interesting to see demo video of new LinuxMCE theme below. It looks very nice in spite of it isn’t finished yet. Theme includes not just new wallpaper and color scheme. But new buttons, images and icons. So, after releasing it’ll be good option to add to your LinuxMCE box more style and fan. Let’s see the demo!

You can see the progress of development of LinuxMCE Star Trek theme here.

LinuxMCE 0810 will have new design of its user interface called Titanium (see UI1 – SLD based GUI, on the picture above). In my opinion it looks more professional then old one. Moreover, users will be able to choose one of the several variation with different data grid colour.

All changes were done without special tool for designing LinuxMCE GUI HADesigner. Instead of that the graphic files were modified in the directory /usr/pluto/orbiter/skins/Basic. A little bit earlier I changed background for media file browser UI2 (OpenGL GUI verion) using the same approach. Because it was difficult to read movie titles with black letters on the dark green. By the way, Titanium will be also available for UI2 soon.

As you may know LinuxMCE community is working hard on the new version. The 0810 is based on Kubuntu 8.10 and currently it’s near to beta. Let’s see what’s new we’ll see in the LinuxMCE 0810:

• Games. In 0810 we’ll able to play in arcade games using MAME plugin. It allows to list, play and pause as well as retrieve metadata from the game packages.
• Z-Wave interface. During preparation a new version Z-Wave interface was improved a lot. It becomes faster and more stable and supports more devices and PC interfaces.
• PVR. MythTV and VDR uses the same directory to store recorded data. The PVR section on the Orbiter contains list of channels, EPG, recording program and more.
• UPnP. The UPnP server in 0810 was changed to Mediatomb which provides better functionality then fuppes used in 0710.
• New IP phones. Two new IP phones were added to the 0810 as PnP devices: Cisco 7910 и Aastra.
• New HID. It’ll allow to use devices such remote control Gyration 3101 to control your system.
• Video adapters. Identification of nVidia and Intel graphic adapters was improved to avoid manual installation of needed drivers.
• Bug fixes. During the preparation of the new version many old bugs were fixed as well as unnecessary packages were deleted from the system.

The latest 0810 alpha 2.24 is usable. Sure it has some problems but it’s already ready for beta. I suspect that delay is cosing by missed DVD installation. But I hope it’ll be released soon. If you’d like to contribute a new functionality or some patch be free to contact with core developers in the IRC channel #linuxmce-devel.

Also design of LinuxMCE site was changed. Now it looks more professional and fresh.