Smart Home Blog

Echoflex Solutions announced its EEK200C Evaluation Kit. For only $149, integrators, OEMs and smarthome enthusiasts will be able to explore the breadth and performance of EnOcean wireless energy harvesting technologies in different conditions as well as capabilities of EnOcean PTM, TCM and STM radio modules and interoperability with other EnOcean-based products.

The kit includes following devices:

• TCM-200C: bi-directional communication with the transceiver module that connects directly to a laptop or PC allowing Windows® based applications to monitor and control;
• STM-110C: solar powered sensor module with integrated reed switch, temperature sensor and set point adjustment;
• PTM-220C: mechanically powered switch module used for on/off and dimming applications.

Additionally the WinEtel utility should be downloaded and installed to monitor radio packages in the EnOcean network.

I like the EnOcean principles of energy harvesting. That approach is not just saving energy and, as result, money and environment. But it also makes consumers life easily because they shouldn’t replace batteries in their devices at all. So, I hope that the EEK200C Evaluation Kit will help integrate EnOcean technology in the many popular commercial and open source home automation systems.

[via EnOcean]

LinuxMCE development team announced 0810 alpha1. That build is done from the 0810 SVN branch and it’s the first community release. The installation procedure is the same as for previous alpha0 but a bit improved and stable.

Do not upgrade your 0710 installation because it’ll beak your system. But it’ll help a lot if you install it on the test machine or on the different partition, play a bit with it and report about working and not working parts.

Personally I’m waiting two things: a new motherboard for my core/hybrid and setup of Internet connection in my new flat. Hope that both will be done next week.

LinuxMCE development team has announced the release cycle. It’ll be 12 months starting from the version 0810. Peer Oliver Schmidt (“Possy”) will take up the role of release wrangler to try to keep developers on schedule and Zaerc is taking over the role of keeping the development build in good shape on a day-to-day basis.

LinuxMCE lost the servers and hosting that PlutoHome, Inc. had been providing for it the early part of this year. So, the big work was done to move the build servers, svn (back to the old charonmedia svn machine), forum, wiki and main website to the new location. But in spite of this the 0810-alpha0 is available for installation and testing. Good job!

The new Z-Wave interface for LinuxMCE is developed hardly now. Currently there is a test version of the interface for i386. Source can be found here.

Following features are already implemented:

• Light control (binary, dimmable)
• Floorplan feedback from local operations and from ALL ON/OFF commands
• Lighting wizard integration
• Busy handling for newer chips
• PIR support in alarm and sensor mode
• Binary sensor support
• Basic wake-up handling (queue is still missing)

and those are coming soon:

• Download configuration
• Multi command handling
• RA-plus-w setback schedule thermostat support
• Merten Dongle support
• Multilevel sensor support

To buy Z-Wave stuff in Europe you can use some shop listed in that wiki page.

As many of you may know Kubuntu 8.04 was released at 24/04/08. So, LinuxMCE developers started thinking about 0804 version. You can find a list of goals for LinuxMCE 0804 here. Some interesting ideas are: adding JavaMO and MAME, improving Z-Wave, MythTV and INSTEON integration, allowing to create a custom themes for Orbiter.

Personally, I’m very interested to have a better VDR integration. The RC1 already contains the latest stable VDR version (1.6.0). Thanks to that I’ll able to see Russian EPG and play with SoftCAM. But to use VDR with more than one media director the proper integration should be done. I understand the problem with VDR. Unlike MythTV it doesn’t have a strict client-server architecture. So, this is a main difficulty with providing a full-featured functionality for media director. But I’m sure that LinuxMCE developers will find a way to implement that. Hope it’ll be in the 0804 release.