Smart Home Blog

After mobile Orbiter based on Java was announced I thought that Symbian Orbiter was dead. JavaMO works fine and it doesn’t need specific platform. The mobile phone just should support Java applications. There are some issues with JavaMO, but it looks much better then S60 Orbiter.

But I was wrong. Thanks to Hari, who started JavaMO development, owners of S60 v.3 smartphones can run native Orbiter on their devices. The updated version of Symbian mobile Orbiter can be downloaded here, demo video – here. Feel free to install it, test and submit found bugs and suggestions here.

UPDATE: There is the newest version of the S60 v3 Orbiter. You can find it here. The changes include hardcoded resolution to 240×320, used by many smartphones, local cache for the screens and some bugfixes.

Convergent Home Technologies based in England announced its new home automation system Dianemo. The Dianemo is based on the opensource smarthome system LinuxMCE with well tested hardware and some customizations. There is a few demo videos on the web site demonstrated all Dianemo features.

The Convergent Home Technologies engineers help a lot to grow up LinuxMCE. Full featured VDR integration, KNX/EIB interface, participation with new Z-Wave interface, sharing experience with hardware – all of this come from the Convergent Home Technologies. As result the LinuxMCE users can use that stuff for free.

I wish good like to Convergent Home Technologies with its Dianemo. Hope its customers will be happy with the system!

Network media tank Popcorn hour doesn’t stop make its fans happy. The last main update is possibility to use a 802.11n for network connection with USB adaptor WN-100. That means that you can get rid of annoying wires.

WN-100 supports all Popcorn hour models including A-100. It supports 64/128 bit strength WEP encryptions, as well as WPA/WPA2 and WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK encryptions and mechanisms and adopts CCA technology which automatically avoids channel conflicts using its channel selection feature.

WN-100 is available standalone for $37.00 and as part of bundle together with A-110 for $250.00 and it’s another good reason to try Popcorn hour.

NAS for the SOHO is not so expensive now. So, to make access to the various files from different PCs much easier it’s better to add it to your home network. But if you already have some USB connected hard drive you can transform it to NAS using NASU2 NAS adapter.

It’s equiped with a USB 2.0/1.1 and an Ethernet 10/100Mbps connection. Additionally NASU2 provides an ability to power most 2.5″ USB hard drives or any low powered USB storage device.

For uses NASU2 offers both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols. So, it’s doesn’t matter which OS runs on client PC – MS Windows, MacOS X or Linux. It always will have access to the data on the storage. To access to the storage outside the LAN NASU2 provides FTP connection. Additionally you can use that adaptor as print-server or Torrent client. Not bad for the 50 bucks device, isn’t it?

[via Business Wire]

Australian Control4 announced integration with XBMC – open source cross-platform media center software. Using a web interface provided by XBMC Control4 users can control media playback from touchscreen panels, ZigBee remove control and keypads.

You can see that integration after jump.
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