Smart Home Blog

It seems that Crestron didn’t satisfy with iViewer – iPhone application offered easy and universal way to implement an interface to the TCP/IP based home automation systems (including Crestron itself). On the CEDIA 2008 Crestron demonstrated its iPhone gear. It allows a complete control and management of home entertainment, AV presentation and environmental systems such as climate, lighting and shades using intuitive graphical interface. That interface provides a real-time status of room temperature, lighting levels, shade position and digital media meta data such as volume, title and artist.

The Crestron Control App for the iPhone can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store without any charges.

[via Remote Shoppe]

Exceptional Home Automation – Crestron programmer company, has released its new product – iLoveControl. The iLoveControl provides an user interface for iPhone/iPod Touch to control Crestron home automation systems. The basic configuration of that interface can be done via web site. Using the web form it’s possible to add there up to 16 zones of audio, video, lights, drapes and HVAC as well as define media sources such as CD players, satellite receivers, iPods, Kaleidescape and other media servers and tuners.

iLoveControl is fully customizable and can be integrated with many IP-based home automation systems such Crestron, AMX, Control4, Lifeware, Lutron and NetStreams. Maybe somebody can try it with LinuxMCE which is also uses TCP/IP for communication between devices.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Open source technologies are good and success. As example I can give you following. Today AMX decided to use LinuxMCE 0710 as a software for the next generation of its home controllers. That decision is result of extremely fast growing open source system for home automation and wide range of supporting hardware and protocols. The price and availability of AMX controllers with LinuxMCE are not known yet.

Next well-known player in the smarthome area Crestron lost its chance to get LinuxMCE. So, maybe Crestron will try to reanimate Pluthome.

More and more companies produced equipment for home automation follow by eco-friendly conception. The well-known player on the smarthome area Crestron is not an exception too. It announced last week its Crestron Green Light product line of lighting, HVAC and shade/drape control. It should help consumers optimize their energy efficiency and cost savings at the same time save our environment.

[via ElectronicHouse]