Automated Home

We all have gadgets that seemingly need endless charging and the nature of our favourite mobile devices means that they are often away from a mains power source. Smart phones and particularly modern tablets like the iPad have even more demanding charging requirements.  For the last four years I’ve been using a little external USB [...]

The £170 ZipaBox from little known Croatian company Zipato challenges VeraLite’s Micasa Verde on price, yet promises a feature set on a par with high-end controllers like the Fibaro Home Centre 2. We put the ZipaBox through its paces to find out if it can really deliver. For this test, we’re using a ZipaBox together [...]

Yes yes, I know you’ve heard it a million times before but we love Plex!  One of the best new features over recent months, PlexSync is used with the many mobile devices in our family, it’s such a fantastic way to take your media with you. Here’s a scenario, it’s Friday afternoon and you know you have [...]

Netatmo is a weather station and air quality monitor for your iPhone, iPad or Android mobile device. It comprises of two cylindrical sensor units, one for outside your house and one for inside. Setting it Up - The instructions point out that you’ll need to find somewhere undercover for the outdoor unit as it shouldn’t get too [...]

  Around three years ago I reviewed the PetPorte SmartFlap, thanks to an urgent need to implement some sort of feline door policy. At the time there were two products that looked like they’d do the job, and I chose the PetPorte pretty much arbitrarily. Much to my chagrin, it turns out that the other [...]

Here’s a great little 6 minute video from our favourite tech podcaster Leo Laporte.  His TWiT network show ‘Before You Buy’ reviews new technology and Leo puts the Belkin system through its paces, demonstrating a setup using the WeMo Switch plus Motion movement sensor all controlled from an iPad (there’s an Android app in the works too). Leo also [...]

Long time contributor to Automated Home, Ken Watt documents his recent move from the world of HomeVision and X10 to a new Z-Wave home automation system powered by the HomeTroller. Hometroller SE-Pro I used to have a dangerously obsessive attachment to my trusty old HomeVision unit, the Pro version of course because I’m that way inclined and [...]

A few months ago we got our hands on the latest product to come out of the Sonos stable and we’ve been listening to it ever since.  Their wireless subwoofer is a handsome beast and its relatively neat dimensions (402 x 158 x 380mm) belie its heft – a dense 16kgs.  If quality equalled weight then we’d already [...]

Fibaro Door/Window Sensor (FGK101-107) First off, we must don our festive hats to Fibaro and congratulate them for winning the Best Gadget of the Year 2012, as voted for by the audience of the Polish Men’s Stuff Awards. “An essential product for every man,” apparently. The sensor In this review I’ll be examining the Fibaro [...]

Vacuuming droids have been one of the first domestic robots to catch on.  The Klarstein’s Cleanfriend will be familiar to anyone that’s seen a Roomba in the past.  Its circular body has a 34cm diameter, it’s 10cms high and it weighs in at around 3kgs. What’s Included? The kit includes a docking station that the clever robot [...]