Smart Home Blog

Google recently announced its new platform Android @ Home which should join all devices in the home for easy configuration and management. The idea is to add Android to each device – TV, STB, washing machine, dimmers, switches, lamps etc. Then using ready-made software or built by yourself using Android @ Home SDK you’ll able to manage those devises from Android smartphone or tablets even over Internet. The current conception when the smarhome is built around a controller won’t be used. Each device will be accessible directly. Additionally Google offers integration with its services like Google Music and some video/TV maybe to stream media content over the house.
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A few days ago a SDK for Roku was openned for all developers. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux to allow programmers use their preferable OS. Using SDK developers can produce their own channels for Roku which will be published in the Channel Store after review and testing.

Roku is cool network player with very reasonable price – $79.99 for SD version, $99.99 for HD and $129.99 for HD + WiFi. But it’s designed to playback online content. As I know currently there is no way to watch stream from local network or from USB mass storage. And this is a big disadvantage for non-US folks. However, I hope those limitations will be fixed with 3rd part extensions developed with Roku SDK. Moreover, maybe it’d be possible use Roku as a client for MythTV or VDR. Will see that.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Recently the new version (4.0) of Maemo SDK VMware Appliance was released. This release includes following: Maemo 4.0 (Chinook) and Maemo 3.2 (Bora) with Nokia Binaries Installer, PyMaemo packages, Vala compiler and its Hildon bindings for Chinook, Maemomm libraries, EVAS (Bora and Chinook, but i386 only), qemu-arm-eabi used as default cpu transparency method, Eclipse with ESbox plugin, and Firefox has now a lot of bookmarks for reference material. Additionally version 4.0 provides code samples for all the libraries and development packages cited above.

Full changelog is available here. The Maemo SDK VMware Appliance 4.0 can be downloaded via HTTP (part 1, 1.0Gb and part 2, 947Mb) or BitTorrent.

I already downloaded and started to use the previous version with beta version of Maemo 4.0 (Chinook). I already built a few packages needed for LinuxMCE Orbiter. Now I’m going to continue my work using the Maemo SDK VMware Appliance 4.0.

UPDATED: After the first running of Maemo SDK VMware Appliance 4.0 I could find the network interface. After a sort googling I got solution – remove the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and restart network service.