Smart Home Blog

A new model of luxury remote with touchscreen NevoS70 was announced on the CES 2008. Its features include:

• Non-line of sight control using Z-Wave(TM) bidirectional wireless communications to ensure reliable command execution and to show the power status of entertainment equipment in the home
• Extended battery life and broad home coverage
• Connection to the home network for multimedia control with industry standard wireless technology (802.11g)
• Ability to view and control any device that has a compatible embedded web server, such as many web-based cameras and media servers
• Control for many home automation devices
• Access to web-based services to deliver real-time information such as news, sports and stock quotes

Together with a NevoConnect NC-50 base station, NevoS70 provides non-line of site IR control, serial device control and power sensing for efficient macro programming and control. NevoS70 communication is based on industry standards—WiFi, UPnP and Z-Wave—to ensure compatibility with a wide range of devices in home entertainment, control, and networking.

Sounds amazing! Looks also. To get NevoS7 in your hand you should just wait a bit and pay $1,199. This is a tiny cost for such perfect device.

[via CePro]

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Buffalo has announced two HD media streamers LT-H90LAN (Lan Only) and LT-H90WN (Lan and Wifi A/B/G/N) as a part of its LinkTheater family. Both allows to stream Music (AAC, MPEG Audio, WMA, WM DRM 10 and MP3), Pictures (JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF), as well as Video (Mpeg-2, H.264 and WMV9), in Full HD resolution: 1920×1080, but they miss of support DivX files. The main feature of Buffalo HD media streamers is DLNA DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Content Protection over Internet Protocol) “a specification for copyrighted content transferred over IP between two compliant DTCP-IP products, and does not allow contents to be transmitted over the internet or shared outside of the home network”. So, the Hollywood studios shouldn’t worry about their copyrights.

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Nokia E65 is new and stylish mobile phone with built-in WiFi. But it has another cool feature - emulation of Cisco 7970. E65 can be connected to the Cisco Call Center as 7970. So, we decided to try add it to our Plutohome installation and see what’s happened. After a few hours of unsuccessful attempts we configured E65 as SIP phone and connected it to the Plutohome Asterisk. It works great! Now outside the office E65 is a mobile phone but near the Plutohome access point it allows to make cheap calls via Asterisk.

We didn’t give up with installation of emulator of Cisco 7970 in the E65. I don’t think that in might be useful (the XML Orbiter won’t provide wide functionality) but we try it again.

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Mirror Media Ltd offers a cool device which contains mirror, TV and PC in one - MirrorMedia. It’s available four models with different diagonal - 20′, 26′, 30′ and 32′ and different PC configuration. The 20′ model features Intel Pentium Mobile 500MHz,
256MB SDRAM, HDD 60GB 2.5” 4500rpm, AGP Video S3 Mobile Savage with 8MB SGRAM 2/3D accelerator, Yamaha YMF724F – Creative Labs SB 128 Compatible, Line out, Line in, MIC, SPDIF, LAN 10/100 on board, Wireless LAN option, USB 2 x USB 2.0. To communicate with TV-PC you can use wireless IR keyboard & mouse. The keyboard includes built in track ball. MirrorMedia TV-PC works under Microsoft Windows XP Pro. The bigger models have faster processor and HDD, more RAM and HDD capacity.

In my mind it’d be much useful to add touchscreen functionality. In that case that computerized TV mirror can be used as control panel for your home automation system. In current implementation is just an expensive (I suspect its price won’t be cheap) toy. Nothing more.

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SysMaster used embedded Linux to create a four-line IP video phone with built-in PBX and audio/video playback capabilities. Tornado M20 appears to be based on a very similar hardware platform with M10 - STB with amazing features and functionality. The M20 connects to local networks via wired or WiFi interfaces. it supports standard SIP-based VoIP registrars, proxies, or outbound proxy servers.

For comfort work with M20 it sports 3.5-inch color LCD display, along with a telephone keypad and handset. It can be connected to the TV via analog RCA video and stereo audio ports.

The M20 is already available with a suggested retail price of $260.

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