Smart Home Blog

Once I already blogged about Ubuntu Home Server. Now it’s time to announce another one - Amahi. Amahi is based on Fedora 8 and offers hard drive disk space monitoring, a private wiki, network PC drive backups and file sharing, Vista calendar / iCal / Outlook integration, a custom web browser search extension for IE and Firefox (very cool), plugin extension support (currently available: browser-based photo slideshow, food recipe recorder, BitTorrent downloader), print server, dynamic DNS configuration for remote access, and simple network setup.

I hope that Amahi can make a live of home users who have more then one PC. But it might be a good idea to add more entertainment stuff such UPnP media server or SlimServer. In any case Amahi is just in beta stage. So, it has a time for improvements.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

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Control4 has added Linux-based, ZigBee-compatible home automation/media networking controller - HC-500. It’s positioned as the mainstream controller choice in between Control4’s low-end HC-300 and luxury HC-1000. The primary goal of producing of HC-500 is a media server, intended for large home theaters requiring extensive I/O connections for device control. However, it also will coordinate lighting, temperature, video cameras, and manual controls such as blind- and garage-door openers. The HC-500 sprots a 160GB hard drive which is, in my opinion, extremely small even for modern media center. Additionally it’s equipped with two USB ports, one Ethernet port, four serial ports (DB9), analog and digital audio I/O jacks, and ZigBee and optional WiFi adapter (Control4 chooses ZigBee because it’s an open standard, unlike Z-Wave, and has more bandwidth. However, support of Z-Wave is gonna be added as well).

The HC-500 can be controlled via on-screen GUI on TV, a various touchscreens or web interface. Using Windows-based Composer Home Edition application, users can customize the system according to his/her requirements.

The HC-500 is shipping now and tagged at $1500.

[via LinuxDevices]

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British Columbia-based embedded board and development services vendor Techsol announced a customizable touch-panel equipped single-board computer based on Linux. The wall-mounted, 4.6 x 3.7 x 1-inch TPC-43 comes with a 4.3-inch touchscreen with resolution 480×272. It’s powered by an undisclosed ARM-920T-based system-on-chip (SoC) clocked at 200MHz or 266MHz and has 64MB of “mobile SDRAM” and 64MB NAND Flash. The TPC-43 is based on Linux and supports both Qt and GTK+ for producing GUI.

Additionally the TPC-43 comes with zPoint Experimenter’s Kit to setup and control a ZigBee mesh network. As you may know ZigBee is a modern wireless technology for home automation. It’s a competitor of Z-Wave which looks more perspective for me.

In any case the price in $400 seems reasonable to such device. To have possibility play with ZigBee devices you should be 100 bucks additionally. So, the whole set will be $500.

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Chinese company has introduced its Linux-based ultra-mini PC - LimePC M1. It’s equipped with a full PC desktop (based on Debian), touchscreen interface, Freescale MPC5121e mobileGT processor, up to 16GB of Flash, 802.11g WiFi, v2.1 EDR Bluetooth wireless and four-plus hours of Lithium Polymer battery power.It’s also planning to produce a model with HDD.

The new LimePC M1 is gonna be available later this year at price $300. The target of LimePC is Chinese market. But if it’ll be released in the rest of world it can be a good competitor of Nokia Internet Tablet. If LimePC will have open OS of course.

[via Linux Devices]

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Recently I mentioned about possibility to control X10 devices from MythTV interface. Here is a detailed explanation how to add that feature into your media center. As I suspected that approach uses Perl interface to the X10 API (ControlX10-CM17). It also needs libdevice-serialpor.

Using approach showed below you’ll able to control X10 devices not only from MythTV on-screen menu but from its remote control as well. Great work!

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