Smart Home Blog

Another in-wall mounts for iPad and iPod Touch – iPort was announced recently. As their analogues they are expensive – $500 and $250 respectively. Both mounts use chassis with a magnetically attached, rectangular fascia. That approach allows install or remove iPad or iPod Touch easily without using any special tools and it makes that kind of the mounts for Apple devices an unique. So, if you’d like to use your iPad or iPod Touch as in-wall controller as well as portable device the iPort looks the best option for that purpose.

[via AutomatedHome]

Crestron is going to release a new touchscreen controller – UFO-4X. It looks like UFO. So, your home design will get a special appeal. The UFO-4X sports a 4.3″ active matrix color touchscreen display with resolution 800 x 480 and wide 160 degrees viewing angle. It offers a virtual keyboard which will be useful to type user’s credentials or searching media in the library. Additionally the touchscreen controller has buttons for navigation and controling playback.

The UFO-4X uses 2.4 GHz RF wireless technology to communicate with Crestron system and has range indoors up to 60 meters. It also supports roaming for extended RF coverage and can be wall mounted.

The UFO-4X should be available earlier 2011 with retail for about $2000. Sure it’s expensive as all other Crestron’s devices.

[via CEPro]

As you may know the release of DLink Boxee Box is delayed till October or November 2010. But now you can see the live demo of the prototype that device (thanks to Engadget!). Even prototype looks nice. The Boxee Box is compact and stylish. It doesn’t looks like the rest media players of HTPC offered on the market.

The Boxee remote control with QWERTY keyboard on the back is really cool! This is what I’m waiting long time. It uses radio frequency but it’d be possible to control IR equipment as well by adding USB IR transmitter. Hope Boxee team will add that feature some day.

LinuxMCE development team recently announced a new version of its Web Orbiter. A new Web Orbiter 2.0 is based on Ajax technology and offers more convenient way to control system from the web browser. The previous version refreshed page every couple of minutes to display updated statuses of devices. Using Ajax technology allows update the changed only elements without refreshing the page.

The new Web Orbiter 2.0 works on any PC with web browser Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Midori or IE. Also it supports mobile browser versions such OperaMini, OperaMobile 10 and S60 browser. So, using it you can setup iPhone, iPad (see the photo above – custom version of UI1) or some another smartphone or webpad as LinuxMCE control panel just adjusting the size of the Orbiter via admin site.

You can get the Web Orbiter 2.0 with the latest update of LinuxMCE 0810.

Danny Mavromatis shared results of his project to build a bridge between Russound RNET and Sonos multi-room audio systems. The bridge is based on small ARM board Arduino and currently supports only based operations such play, stop, pause etc. But Danny promised to expand the bridge features and keep us updating with the progress of his project.

See the demo video after break.
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