Smart Home Blog

ControlThink introduced its new Z-Wave USB adapter with upgradable firmware. Now you shouldn’t buy a new adapter to get advantages of updated protocol. You need just the latest version of firmware and Windows XP or Vista based PC.

The “industry’s first upgradeable Z-Wave USB Adapter” runs at 4x (40kbps) speeds but it’s also compatible with 1x (9kbs) devices. The new ControlThink Z-Wave adapter is available on the producer’s web site and tagged at $39.95.

P. S. It’d be great to have support of that adapter by LinuxMCE. But as I know the biggest disadvantage of Z-Wave technology is its stand-off (ZigBee is much better in this regard because it uses open protocol). So, it’s not so easy to support the changed Z-Wave protocol.

[via Engadget]

OmWave produced the most elegant Windows Home Server, in my mind. Its OmServer is wrapped in the smoking hot case and equipped with 4 hard disk drives for 4TB of storage, a 2GHz Celeron processor with 1GB of memory.

Starting price is 960€ which is not so expensive for such gorgeous design.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

HotHardware published shots of Asus’ upcoming Eee Desktop. They look amazing! If Asus adds TV out and 5.1 audio Eee Desktop can be used as a media client for IP-based multi-room audio/video system (LinuxMCE, for example). It seems that Eee so compact and thin that can be mounted behind TV. Let’s see what specification will have Eee desktop and what price.

Richard Gray started to ship its power management system – PowerVault. It includes an UPS, a parallel power delivery system (there’s a 1200 on board) and more. The PowerVault can keep runing your home automation system for several hours to several days depending on the load during power outages or interruptions. It can be placed up to 750 meters away from your equipment.

The PowerVault power management system is available for certified installers with price $29500. It’s definitely not chip but if you need your system 24×7 it might be a solution.

[via CEPro]

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]