You can visit the Z~Series manuals part of SmartHome.com.au to view them.

Without a doubt the most requested thing after the Bespoke Range itself are the manuals that go along with it. Well, today we’ve updated on customer service centre to include the manual for the In-wall Appliance Controller.

To view the manual click ‘In-wall Appliance Controller Manual‘.

We’ve recently taken delivery of a fresh batch of Vera 2 units and, having tested them and made sure we were happy with their functionality, have begun to ship them out of our warehouse.

As of the time of writing the home server page still displays pictures of the first version of the Vera server. We’ll fix these up shortly, but thought you might appreciate the heads up in the interim.

Our warehouse team are currently hard at work getting through all the back orders and, if you have ordered, you should soon receive your shipping notification. At this stage we expect that all the orders, of which there are many, should have shipped out by Wednesday.

French automation company, Domadoo, have had the chance to test one such light bulb with the X10 home automation system. They tested the Philips Master LED light bulb with good results.

Testing the bulb with the LM12 and the LD11 they found that:

• X10 could dim the Philips LED energy saving light bulb
• It could dim it to a minimum of 10%
• It could brighten it to a maximum of 100%

We expect that once we are able to get our hands on these light bulbs we’ll find the same results with Z-Wave.

Chad Barraford is living the dream. Inspired by Edwin Jarvis, the superhero’s man-servant turned computer in the film adaptation of Iron Man, the 27 year old Barraford pieced together a digital life assistant, dubbed JARVIS, to keep his household (and life) in order. JARVIS is built on a 4-year-old Mac mini linked to everything from his home lighting/security and RFID entry system [...] JARVIS is always aware of Chad’s location (thanks to Google Latitude) and can be controlled in the house via remote control or a wireless mic and the Mac’s built-in speech recognition software; or via Twitter and text messages when away.

In light of JARVIS not being available for download or purchase, the question has been asked of us if there’s an alternative. And there is.

Indigo, our Mac home automation software for X10 and Indigo, can be set up to do most everything that JARVIS does. Like JARVIS it doesn’t do it all our of the box, but paired with an X10 starter kit and extended using AppleScript the sky is the limit.

Both take the functionality of previous kits but apply it for use with Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows 7. To do so, they use the advanced RF-based X10 computer controller

Fore more information visit our iPhone home automation page.

And don’t forget, if you’re interested in using your iPhone with Z-Wave there’s a Z-Wave iPhone solution available as well.

The solution is simple: download and install the free Mac media centre application Plex, purchase Indigo, then install the free Indigo for Plex add on.

The beauty of the plug-in is that not only is zero setup required if Plex and Indigo are running on the same machine, but if Indigo is running on a remote machine, one need only point the plug-in to that remote machineís internal IP address, input the Indigo Server id and password and setup is done!  The plug-in, as can be seen from the screenshots below enables the  user, from within Plex,  to 1) control all devices (viewing, quick-toggling if not-dimmable, toggling and dimming by user-defined increments if dimmable ), 2) control Action Groups (viewing and executing) and 3) control Variables (viewing and editing).

Via

Designed as a mini keyboard with built in 3D mouse (think of the Nintendo Wii controller and you have the idea), the HTPC keyboard is compatible with all home theatre PCs running on Windows, Mac or Linux.

It has an amazing range of 50 metres, meaning it can also be used with our video senders for sending your downloaded movies to your TV and controlling it remotely.

Find out more on our dedicated HTPC keyboard page.