The SmartHome Show 2006 took place in the NEC in Birmigham over the 2nd to the 5th of March. AV was once again a large component of the exhibition and the ubiquitous flat screen LCD's and Plasmas seemed to be on every stand. However there was also plenty of lighting control, home networking, whole house audio and cctv/security too...

Submission by Keith Finnett -  Let's get straight to the point - does Microsoft Windows work as an entertainment centre? If you read the computing press you'll know the answer is yes, no, and maybe. If you want one, you'll have to be an early adopter with deep pockets - most pre-built systems retail at around the £1,000 mark. There are some great looking systems out there (Elonex's range look very tempting), but few of them would look good in my living room - and certainly not at that price...

One of the most popular projects that readers of Automated Home embark upon, is moving all of their media files (music, video, photos etc) onto a central server. Many of us have ripped our entire CD collections to MP3s on our hard drives over the last few years and, if you're like me, also taken the time to ensure they are tagged correctly and complete with album art.

Of course there have been a myriad of portable MP3 players that have enabled us to carry a selection of our tunes around with us. However, a similar product to allow us to access to an entire collection in the home environment has been a much rarer beast. Even though its five years since we reviewed our first domestic, networked mp3 player (the Dell Digital Audio Receiver) new devices of note have been relatively thin on the ground. The DDAR was a good first generation player and there have been a few other devices of note like the SliMP3 range, but nothing to really come close to the usability or design pinnacle of the ubiquitous Apple portable products. Until this year...

Submission by Nick Shore - Eh whats that, yet another programmable remote control, and for under £50, (see the link at the bottom) but is it any good ?

First impressions
The shape is familiar to any Tivo user, this remote is bigger than the silver peanut, but is still useable in one hand, nicely weighted with contours underneath it just feels right. Hit the glow button or any other keys and the screen and keys light up electric blue...emote arrived, and I had a basic setup up and running within 20 minutes of unpacking it, including upgrading it to the latest firmware...

Submission by Keith Finnett - It's not often you can buy something that's well built, ergonomic and a great gadget for under £50 - but Microsoft have produced a piece of hardware that would be a steal at twice the price.

As a fully paid-up Windows Media Centre household we have become absolutely reliant on the PC that sits upstairs to provide our whole-house entertainment. Microsoft's latest version of Windows Media Centre (version 2005) gives us access to live and recorded TV, music and (camcorder) video, DVDs, our ever growing photo gallery, and most recently digital radio which mysteriously appeared with the installation of Rollup 2 even though my tuner cards (both from BlackGold) did not provide support for this...

Submission by Steve Jones - I wanted to improve the control of my central heating system by utilising my home automation controller (HomeVisionPro) whilst still retaining the original central heating timer so it could easily be switched back on if the controller was down or if I needed to take HV out if we moved...

Submission by Paul Gale - Following a post by one of the members of the UKHA_D mailing list, I recently bought a home brew product that enables control of a Sky or Sky+ box from a PC (Windows or Linux) and ultimately, the Internet. I've been looking for something to do this for years so thought I'd share my findings with my fellow HAers...

Submission by David Pullen

Some of you will know that I am a big fan of the VIOM from Phaedrus. I use 4 VIOMs to control my heating, some windows and blinds, led lights, electromagnetic locks and also to take inputs from motion detectors and a variety of other devices. Some of the VIOMs are connected directly via the serial port and some over ethernet via MSS100s from Lantronix. It is rather helpful being able to connect the VIOMs over the network and so I was pleased to hear that Phaedrus was producing the Netiom. When I contacted Roy Schofield (at Phaedrus) I was even more interested to hear that he was planning to work on a xAP-enabled Netiom...