Smart Home Blog

Recently I found a good example of DIY HTPC. The 9 yeas old music center AIWA NSX-430 was used as a base. All its functions were saved except cassette player (in any case it’s not so important in our digital century). For HTPC are used following parts:

• Motherboard: Shuttle FN85 with NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with ZALMAN CNPS7700-AlCu
• RAM: 2×512 Kingston DDR-533
• Video: nVidia GeForce 6600 GT AGP
• HDD: Samsung SATA II HD350HJ – 350GB
• Optical drive: Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7170S SATA
• PSU: Shuttle SB75G2, 220 W

Using AUX input sound comes from HTPC to music center speakers. Moreover, it’s possible to use built-in NSX-430 equalizer and DSP.

The article is on Russian. But there is a lot of photos which cover all stages of assembly. As result the old music center can be used as HTPC as well.

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If you continuously forget to watering your plants Botanicalls Twitter is what you actually need. Using a simple electric parts and a bit knack you’ll get an intelligent system which will measure moisture level and notify you via Twitter (in case of connecting the system to the Internet) about necessity of watering. That’s really cool, it’s it? But maybe that irrigation system would be more useful because you need just put the water into tank time by time. The rest will be done automatically.

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Once I wrote a short article about energy monitors which can be used in home to reduce energy consumption. Here is another one - EnerJar. The winner of the Greener Gadgets design competition the EnerJar offers a simple way to monitor energy consumption for device connected to it and can be made by yourself. If you have heeded hardware (including a jar), electro technology knowledge and a little patience go ahead. Otherwise it might be better just to buy Kill-A-Watt.

[via Inhabitat]

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A cool example of creation of controllable 1-wire thermostat. The author claims that there is a production thermostat with similar functionality tagged at $54.82. So, it depends to you buy it or make it by yourself.

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In spite of a big list of disadvantages and a bunch of modern home automation technologies X10 is still popular and used. LinuxMCE - open source smarthome system supports X10 devices and allows to connect CM11 to be able to manage them. That new wiki post describes briefly the procedure of installation and configuration CM11 under LinuxMCE. So, hope it’ll useful for all who decided to use LinuxMCE and X10 together.

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