Smart Home Blog

After a few months silence Fiire has announced its new products for LinuxMCE smarthome system. They include Fiire12TB, FiirePrestigio, FiirePrestigio Lite and FiireInvisible.

New core Fiire12TB comes now with 12TB storage with built-in RAID to store media content. Additionally the box sports Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 500GB system HDD, Dual Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 HD Audio with analog, SPDIF optical and coax/RCA, nVidia 7150 graphics with HDMI and VGA connectors and DVD RW. It’s quiet and low-heat/power model and fits in a standard A/V rack. The price of Fiire12TB is $1899 without HDD for media storage.

FiirePrestige is an elegant media director fitted into aluminum case a built-in VFD display and i/r receiver. It’s equiped by Intel® Core 2 Duo E4600 2.4 GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD (to use it as a core), Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 HD audio, with analog and SPDIF coax/RCA fro digital audio, nVidia 7150 graphics with HDMI output, DVD RW. The FiirePrestige Lite has the same spec except luxury case and VFD display. The price of FiirePrestige and FiirePrestige Lite is $899 and $549 respectively.

FiireInvisible is a slim 2″ silent VESA and Wall mount media director. It features AMD BE 2400 processor, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD (for core/hybrid installation), Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 HD audio, with analog and SPDIF coax/RCA fro digital audio, nVidia 7050 graphics with HDMI, VGA, Component and S-video connectors. Plus VESA and WALL mounting kit is included into package. The price of FiireInvisible is $799.

Fiire core and media director use noiseless components and support HD (1080i), de-interlacing, OpenGL 3D effects, and alpha blending. Also all media directors can be used as core/hybrid as well. Core (Fiire12TB or some of media directors with HDD) comes with pre-installed and pre-configured LinuxMCE 0710.

It seems Fiire took in to account negative experience with its previous hardware. Especially with FiireStation 1″ and 2.2″. According to opinion of folks who bought previous Fiire stuff, only remote with gyroscope FiireChief was a good acquisition. Hope the new Fiire products justify hopes and spent money.

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LinuxTag, Europe’s leading exhibition on Linux and Open Source took place from May 28 - 31, 2008 at Berlin’s Messezentrum unter dem Funkturm. LinuxMCE community participated in that major event. KR, Zaerc, Hari, DanielK22, Posde, ddamron and TSCHAK showed mostly full range of devices supported by LinxuMCE: Z-Wave adapter and modules, IP phones and cameras, different kinds of Orbiters - Nokia Internet Tablet, JavaMO, Symbian MO and Windows XP, and remote controls. That exhibition installation can be used as a start for newbies who want to have home automation system with rich functionality and open code in their houses. That wiki page contains a bunch of nice shots which shows LinuxMCE in action. Also that PDF presentation might be interesting for all who’d like to know what is LinuxMCE and its basic functions (thanks to Daniel).

My congratulations to LinuxMCE exhibition team, all developers and community (I’m also a part of LinxuMCE community :)). We’re making amazing product!

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Finally I gathered oneself up to upgrade my LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 up to the latest stable version. The point to do that was VDR 1.6.0. It’s much better then 1.4.7. Especially because it supports UTF-8. So, Russian EPG is displayed now correctly on the on-screen menu. Another small but useful improvement in the integration with VDR is showing information about the currently played channel on the Orbiter.

The upgrade was performed perfectly. All my data and preferences were saved and transferred to the new system. I just installed a few packages such lcdproc and vdradmin-am. Next to build and configure stream-server and CI + CAM.

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Today I found this discussion on the LinuxMCE developer forum about a search of light alternative for Ruby. Ruby is used to implement the custom logic of new devices added in the system. It’s called Generic Serial Device or GSD. Ruby is good for that purpose except it’s heavy a bit. So, the idea is to find something lighter but with the same embedded properties to provide basic home automation control and a/v control on a very cheap platform.

The Lua seems a good option. It’s simple, easy embedded and light. So, most probably it’ll chosen by LinuxMCE developers. Because there are more positive responses so far.

I developed an interface on Ruby between custom controller, based on ICPDAS, and LinuxMCE. I like Ruby because it looks like Perl. And I didn’t spend a lot of time to learn it. Haven’t seen any row of code by Lua yet. But if it’ll replace Ruby in GSD will port the interface to the new language. Or maybe Ruby and Lua will be available in GSD both. In any case will see.

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Yesterday the final version of LinuxMCE 0710 was released. Basically, it’s exactly the same as RC1 except just two thing. The first one is adding a few packages into debian cach to speedup installation. And the second one is updated version of ZWave interface. So, if you have installed RC1 there is no reason to upgrade it.

I have to find time to upgrade my 0710 Beta 4 and play with VDR 1.6. And waiting for the first version of 0804.

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