Automated Home

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 [...]

Danish company Poly-Control has launched a new wireless Z-Wave door lock that retro-fits to your existing cylinder lock, deadbolt, magnetic lock etc turning it into one that can be operated from anywhere in the world. Poly-Lock can be controlled remotely via the iPhone or Android smartphone app, a web interface or Poly-Control’s own keypad, the Poly-Pad. [...]

  Zipato is an all in one home automation solution from Croatia.  Out of the box it supports Z-Wave, however it’s not tied to a single smart home technology. It can be expanded to support ZigBee and KNX and there’s also promised future support for Insteon plus technologies based on 433MHz such as LightwaveRF. Zipato have [...]

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 [...]

  The “RaZberry” is launching next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.   The $59 kit includes a hardware daughter board that snaps onto the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO connector plus a license for “Z-Way” controller software.  Read on for the full PR and links. “The Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive yet powerful mini-computer that’s taking the development [...]

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 [...]

Perceptive Automation have released beta v6 of Indigo, their Home Automation suite for Max OS X.  Amongst a raft of new features there’s now support for Z-Wave devices and they offer a free trial version of Indigo 6 beta (trial period extended from 30 to 45 days during beta).  Read on for all the new features. [...]

The fine folks at Fibaro and Vesternet were kind enough to lend us a sizeable home automation system based around Fibaro’s premium Home Center 2 controller, plus a bunch of their Z-Wave modules too. Ant Skelton has had the system on test for a few months and has given it a damned good seeing to. [...]

Polands smart home specialist, Fibaro have launched a new device to their range of home automation modules.  The universal sensor is designed to adapt any wired non z-wave sensor (gas, smoke, motion etc) into z-wave one. “Universal Binary Sensor FGBS-001 – The Universal Binary Sensor is a wireless module that makes it possible to improve [...]

The guys at Vesternet have just added a Z-Wave controllable lock to their online catalogue.  They say this is the first EU Z-Wave lock that has passed their internal testing and it’s fully compatible with other Z-Wave devices.  The lock can be fitted to most standard doors and should be in stock in around 10 [...]