Automated Home

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 [...]

CommandFusion are well known for their iViewer mobile home automation app.  They’ve recently posted some useful links in our forums for a couple of video tutorials that give a good insight into their powerful guiDesigner software.  This is a Windows application that provides a CI or DIY installer a drag and drop environment to develop custom user interfaces that [...]

If you weren’t following the horror story of Wired journalist Mat Honan’s personal hacking over the weekend, then do yourself a favour and read his article or watch his interview on This Week in Tech below. It’s clear that Apple and Amazon’s security procedures were less than impressive.  They have already been changed as a result of this [...]

Loxone have launched a new IR Extension device that sits in the consumer unit, like its Miniserver, which talks to up to 8 infra-red modules, that can be distributed throughout your home automation system. The IR-module and 1 pair of transmitters as a set are €199 and then further modules (up to 8 per extension) [...]

We love a good hardware hack and here’s a great one from Automated Home reader Martin Howell. A Velleman IR kit plus a makeup mirror and some Arduino jiggery-pokery allows Martin’s home to let him know when there’s something in his mail box on the gatepost. My mailbox is on the gatepost, and the erratic [...]

In a quest to make our MacBook last out until next years rumoured major redesign (carbon fibre anyone?) we decided to do the trendy thing and install an SSD. However we’ve always been used to having a big hard drive so the 128GB SSD we chose wasn’t going to allow us to hold our entire [...]

In this months ‘My Automated Home’ feature, Nigel Giddings shows us his ingenious set-up that grabs a 3G signal from one corner of his rural idyll, beams it 300 meters back to his home and redistributes it to the family.  If you’re in the countryside and conventional ADSL or cable broadband is not available, then [...]

xAP is an open Home Automation Protocol, created by Automated Home readers almost a decade ago.  It allows many disparate systems to talk to each other – for example your Caller ID interface could send packets to your Joggler to display details when someone rings.  Or perhaps you need your Comfort Alarm system to be [...]

It’s hard to believe, but its four and a half years since we built our first proper rackmount media server for the Automated Home.  Our tutorial for the MkI is still one of our most popular articles and it’s easy to see why (you may like to read our tutorial on the original Jukebox server [...]

UK Home Automator turned podcaster, Don McAllister, is famous for his high quality video tutorials for the Mac.  This week he comes back to his roots covering a true smart home application and an Automated Home favourite – Plex. Like us, Don is “blown away” by the OpenSource media player / library manager and the [...]