Smart Home Blog

Recently I found the Verve – the first (at least I had never seen before any) commercial lighting control system based on EnOcean. EnOcean is a modern wireless technology to easily build your home automation system. Comparing with another technologies such Z-Wave or ZigBee, EnOCean has a big advantage. It doesn’t use any battery to power devices. Instead of that it convert electromagnetic, piezogenerators, solar cells, thermocouples etc into usable electrical energy.

There is, unfortunately, not any detailed info, price and availability of the Verve. But it’s nice to see that EnOcean becomes more popular.

P. S. I just would like to remind you that LinuxMCE has basic support of EnOcean too. See that wiki page for more details.

Today the second beta version of LinuxMCE 0810 was released. I’d like highlight following changes there. The first one is very important for non English spoken countries. It’s support of UTF-8 (I participated in that task too). Thanks to that addition of new translations in the system will be simpler.

Another interesting change is improving of setup of graphic card drivers and adding of VDPAU support to the MythTV and Xine. So, I hope it’ll allow to playback MKV files using Xine and not Mplayer (I don’t oppose to Mplayer but the pause doesn’t work during MKV playback under my LinuxMCE 0710 installation).

The DVD with new 0810 Beta2 can be downloaded from the official LinuxMCE torrent. Note that you still use installation scripts to setup the latest version of LinuxMCE 0810.

C-Bus users now have a possibility to build wireless network as well as a wired. It might be needed when existing system is expanded and you don’t want to put additional cables. Currently only wireless switches, dimmers, scene controls and remote controls are available. Unfortunately there are no any security sensors or thermostats yet.

The switches, dimmers and scene controls are available in two styles – Neo and Saturn. Switches and dimmers can have two or four buttons. Scene controls – only four. To integrate wireless devices into wired system the C-Bus RF Gateway should be used. It provides a C-Bus protocol communication bridge between a single C-Bus RF wireless system and a single C-Bus wired network.

Wireless C-Bus devices look nice but there are two big disadvantages which limit their usage. The first one is small choice of available devices. And the second one is a range of transmitting of the commands. If I’m not wrong a wireless C-Bus device cannot re-transmit command sent from the controller via gateway. So, to improve a signal coverage additional gateway should be added. Comparing with Z-Wave or ZigBee where each device in the network can re-transmit sent commands.

But in any case, for existing C-Bus users the wireless devices can help extend their network without breaking walls.

Yesterday the release candidate 1 of LinuxMCE 1.1 is out. According to release note all known issues of beta 2 were fixed. So, you can download (from Torrent, as all previous releases) and try it. Please, submit all found bugs to help LinuxMCE developers come to stable version faster.

I tried to install Linux MCE 1.1 Beta 2 but during installation IP of my PC was lost. As result of that the installation failed. It happen “because LMCE uninstalls knetworkmanager in place of arping midway through the installation.” There are actually two ways to solve it (thanks to gazlang):

• re-boot and re-start the LMCE installer when it loses connection, then it’ll go all the way through;
• install arping before starting the LMCE installer, reboot first and make sure you are still connected to the net.

You may know how many new players are coming to the home automation scene with their solutions. But maybe half of them or less stay there. The rest become a history. CEPro gives five reasons of those faults:

• Too many features – it’s better to start from one automation area – lighting, security etc and then add another one by one.
• Software-only models – producer doesn’t care about hardware at all.
• Misguided recurring revenue plans.
• All IP – ignore others protocols such Z-Wave, ZigBee, X10 etc.
• Money – spend a lot of money to promote the product and not for product itself.

I agree with those assertions except the first one. IMHO you can produce excellent lighting control system. But you didn’t provide for possibility extending it (on architecture level) it might be very difficult to add security or media functionality. You should design the system as multi-functional from the beginning. Otherwise all extensions will be just patches. Sure, there is no reason to delay with the first release till all functionality will be implemented. It can be done step by step.

Update: New version of this article with answers for some readers questions can be found here.