Smart Home Blog

As you may know LinuxMCE supports smartphones under Symbian OS 1st edition, Windows Mobile 2003 and Treo as mobile Orbiters to control your home. It uses Bluetooth to communicate with smarthome system. So, it’s too difficult port every time the code to the new version of mobile OS. So, a big fan of LinuxMCE Hari decided to develop the Orbiter on Java Mobile platform. In that case we can have universal code which can work even on ordinary mobile phone with support of Java and Bluetooth. The idea of Java Orbiter will be more attractive if you remember about Google’s Android.

The progress of development of JavaMO (Java Mobile Orbiter) you may see on the picture. It’s really cool work! To get the latest news about JavaMO, please, read that topic on the LinuxMCE forum. If you’d like to participate in development or investigate the code just checkout it from the SVN repository. All contributors are very welcome!

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Many users of Nokia770 claim that the device work unstable as LinuxMCE Orbiter. The Orbiter crashes very often, especially on Video screen. So, I decided to make a brief research to make device more stable. Here is a few suggestions.
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My project - Plutohome Orbiter for Nokia770/N800 was accepted to the N810 maemo device program! Thanks to Nokia I’ll able to port and test the Plutohome/LinuxMCE Orbiter to the new N810 and smarthome folks will get a possibility to control their houses using Nokia’s Internet Tablet.

Thank you Nokia for the perfect gadgets and choice of Plutohome Orbiter project!

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People on the LinuxMCE forum confirm that smartphone Nokia N70 can be used as Mobile Orbiter. It’s good because before I heard about support OS Symbian 1th Edition. But N70 is based on Second Edition according to Wikipedia. So, only Third Edition doesn’t allow to run the Orbiter.

Mobile Orbiter uses Bluetooth to communicate with core. It offers function ‘Follow-Me’ transparently. You just leave one room and come to another with your mobile phone with activated Orbiter. Media will follow you in that case.

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Yesterday I released an updates for the LinuxMCE 0704 and Plutohome 2.0.0.44 Orbiters. Following changes were done:

• fixed a bug with running Orbiter from the application menu;
• fixed a bug with incorrect destroying of the Orbiter;
• modified a bit layout to fit captions for LinuxMCE version;
• added appropriate description for LinuxMCE version;
• fixed a few spelling mistakes in the ‘About’ section

Also, I’m planning perform following tasks next step: add all Orbiter’s dependencies to the Maemo extra repository and build a package for MS TrueType Fonts. The package for MS TrueType Fonts is needed because people usually forget to copy those fonts from the core to their Nokia. As result all dynamic captions are not visible.

The latest versions of the Orbiter for LinuxMCE and Plutohome can be downloaded as usual from the Maemo garage.

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