Items Tagged With hardware

Many years ago I discovered the Automated Home site, and within it was the Node Zero gallery. The projects in that gallery inspired me to build my own. The opportunity came up when moving into my current home - an old semi-detached house needing a little work. There was a period of several weeks between owning the house and moving in that meant that I could go crazy with installing cables without anything getting in the way...

Home automators are always messing around with hard drives, and that can be a pain.  Well here's a product to ease your suffering.  The Elonex SATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station is a fast, easy way to access bare drives.  You simple insert your disk into the dock and instantly it's accessible at 480Mbps via it's built in USB 2 interface.  It supports both desktop 3.5" and laptop 2.5" drives too and cost £29.99...

Why automate your lights? Well, to be honest, most of my house is automated, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. There are lots of benefits in automating parts of your house, lighting in particular just makes life easier, lights coming on when you walk into a room is better than switching them on yourself! ....and because they turn themselves on, they turn themselves off too, so you can't forget...

Do you NEED to be able to connect to the net always?  Do you feel funny when you aren’t near a wi-fi hotspot?  Are you outside the range of traditional ADSL and cable but have 3G cellular cover? Does your home or office need a backup broadband service for those frustrating outages?  If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions then the new Vodafone USB Stick 3G Modem may be for you.  Read on for our video, photos and full review of this mini marvel…

Here's anther great, inexpensive candidate for a home automation server.  The HP DX2250 features a 2.6GHz ATHLON 64 X2 5000+, has 2GB or RAM and a 250GB drive.  It even ships with Vista, although you may like to change that to Windows Home Server or your favourite flavour of Linux.  With the limited time offer of £50 cashback this is a true bargain PC at around £155+vat !