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Watch That Tiny $74 1.5GHz Android-Powered Thumb-Puter In Action If you know someone who would benefit by turning more of the day-to-day operation of their home over to gadgets, we have several products you might be interested in (and one you shouldn’t be).
The home automation industry abandoned its original goal of making things simpler loooooong ago. Now, everyone’s just racing to design the most ostentatious devices they can—like Savant’s Virtual Control, which gives your entire house a per-room touch interface.
Ever wake up in a fitful cold sweat with the cutting realisation that there’re certain areas in your home where you can’t watch TV!!??. Then Electronic House’s Home of the Year is for you.
With two products, a touchscreen thermostat and a wireless portable thermostat remote, Honeywell has changed how I control my heating and cooling forever. In a good way.
There are already a few home automation iPhone apps in the store, but here at CEDIA it’s clear that all of the home automation heavies have definitely discovered the obvious: the iPhone makes for a great universal touchscreen remote for everything from your AC to your living room blinds to your music collection. And most of them won’t make you pay the price of a snazzy dedicated touchscreen controller to get it, either. Most of them.
It’s been a long while since we mentioned Philips range of Pronto home-control remote systems, but Philips hasn’t forgotten them: it’s been making the mega-remotes even more mega with the upcoming TSU9800. With a bigger touchscreen (6.4-inches, folks), and an dock that also does ambient lighting, it can also be mounted on the wall of your swanky Wi-Fi-enabled remote-controlled house to let you switch on “audio/video servers” for which it gives “feedback information such as album/DVD art and song information.” Philips has also updated the software used to program the remote through a PC, and now ProntoEdit Professional 2.0 lets you drag and drop design your configurations and user interfaces for the 9800. Swish indeed: which is why it’s due to cost US$2,400 when it’s out in September. Press release below.
Even though most Twitter users use it to inform the world of their bowel movements, Justin Wickett came up with a slightly more clever use for the app. He uses an INSTEON switch and a computer in order to monitor a Twitter account for the on or off switch command send from his mobile phone. When it’s received, the computer flicks the switch and turns off the light. Between the text message delay, the fact that he needs a COMPUTER hooked up, and the general way-too-geekiness of Twitter, he’s better off setting up an actual home automation system for his lights. [Vimeo via Hacknmod]
Crestron, the company that makes crazy high-end home automation equipment that lets you turn off your lights by just breathing loudly, just announced Windows Sideshow support. You remember Windows Sideshow, right? The Windows Vista feature that lets you feed Vista’s Gadgets onto an external device. Crestron’s including this on all Crestron touchpanels and 2-way devices that support dynamic text. Not only does it read data, you can even send control information back to Windows to change a song or turn off your BitTorrent downloads because you’re about to play some Xbox Live.
This is the Sony NHS-130C, a monolithic black rack that offers high-end HD video and audio through an entire house, from home theaters to a master bedroom. In fact, Sony says the NHS-130C offers multi-room “control of movies, audio, lighting, temperature, security systems,” and by the look of it, probably Death Star lasers too. Would you like to know the list of AV and domotics gadgets you can get for US$85,000?
This is what my future home will look like: clean, simple, white— like a doctor’s office, you might think. But when I turn a nondescript “white box cube,” all sorts of crap starts happening: what you thought was my painting is now my TV, a planter starts emitting coloured mood-light, music spews from a mural on the wall and screens embedded in the cabinets spring to life. What Austrian furniture designer Skloib has invented is, essentially, the Austin Powers bachelor pad of 2015, and I want it to be a reality. Soon, please. [Trendir]
