Automated Home

Amongst a huge raft of other announcements, Apple have just launched their latest iOS device, the “iPad mini”. With a lower cost and a smaller form factor more of these may find their way onto our walls and into our laps for home automation system control.  Here are the details… iPad mini Aluminium Body, 7.2mm [...]

Logitech have launched their the new Harmony Touch universal remote control.  Check out the video below where Ian Crowe, senior manager of the Harmony portfolio, introduces the newest member of the Logitech Harmony line of remote controls, showing the colour  touch screen and gesture based controls.  The Harmony Touch is on sale now for around £150 Advanced [...]

Crestron have just released a set of new VT Pro-e design templates for their iPad Home Automation interface. They say the new graphics are a complete redesign and will help dealers and programmers create more sophisticated and modern interfaces for their clients… Crestron Standard for iPad, the new VT Pro-e design template for the Apple iPad, is now available [...]

We are always on the look out for some cheap wall mount action for our iPad and this looks just the ticket – particularly if you’re not the worlds greatest DIYer. The £15 Koala Mount attaches to your wall with removable 3M Command strip in seconds and will hold all current iPad models along with many other [...]

Home Automation software makers, HomeSeer, have just put a 45 minute webinar video of an introduction to HSTouch – their touchscreen interface software. If you’re a new HSTouch user or even thinking of going with this UI for your smart home control then check out the video below… “Keeping in touch with the world (and [...]

Almost exactly a year ago we brought you the first of in our series of ‘My Automated Home’ articles.  It was submitted by Soitjes Soit and took us through v1 of his home brew Digital Server software.  Now 12 months later Soitjes has completely rewritten the application and has released v2, designed to work on [...]

CUE designs and manufactures IP-based integration systems with control panels and has just launches two new touchscreens that are ideal for home automation applications. The Cuenium2 range feature PoE and are available in 7″ (800 × 480) and 12″ (280 × 800) table models, to hang on the wall or recessed into the wall. “The [...]

Schneider Electric, the UK distributors of Clipsal C-Bus products, tell us they are hoping to launch the new C-Touch C-5000CT2 Spectrum Touchscreen next month. The unit is available in wall mounted or desktop versions and includes infrared remote control capability plus proximity sensing for control or screen wake up.  The new display supports 65k colours [...]

UK based firm – inrom – have develop an embedded flush-mounted 7″ touchpanel that supports many of the common home automation standards like X10, Z-Wave, Rako Controls, Applied Digital and UPnP, (support is also in the works for KNX, EnOcean and ZigBee). The fan-less solid state design uses an ARM CPU and consumes just 7 [...]

A few guys on our forums have been working on using the O2 Joggler as a home automation controller.  With some hacking they’ve put together a system that enables the Joggler to send and receive xAP packets, potentially allowing it to control almost any smart home system whilst showing live updates of say caller ID, [...]