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Newest Product in the mHome Family Integrates Digital Media and Digital Home Control Surrey, BC – September 2, 2008 Today, Embedded Automation announced commercial availability of mPanel, the newest member of the mHome Product Family. mPanel will be available for pre-order on September 10, 2008, with shipments commencing on October 13, 2008. mPanel provides a integrated user interface for digital media and digital home control: mPanel’s Digital Media Interface, which implements UPnP AV Control Point technology, can select music, with rich meta data, from any computer or storage on your local area network and play it through the on-board amplifier. … Continue reading Embedded Automation Announces Commercial Release of mPanel

VidaBox Partners with Charmed Quark Systems to create vAutomation™: Complete Media Management & Automation Solutions for the Mid-to-High-End AV Market Westbury, NY – September 2nd – VidaBox LLC proudly presents its new line of automation and media management packaged solutions called vAutomation™, powered by Charmed Quark Controller (CQC), the popular control and automation system from Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd.  As an extremely powerful, professional-level software package, CQC allows mid-to-high-end custom integrators to offer automation solutions with the features, flexibility, and extensibility formerly found only on more expensive and proprietary systems. “One of our goals has always been to simplify every … Continue reading VidaBox’s vAutomation Platform Tightly Integrates Media Center & Automation Technologies

This edition ripped straight from CE Pro…It seems Niveus Media is done with pushing their recently developed Niveus EDGE Extender.  The might have been Xbox 360-based Extender (sans gaming) is out and the HP MediaSmart Connect is in.  Interesting turn of events for something that must have taken a lot of time and money to complete. Niveus is also updating their Movie Gallery adding support for better metabase, higher resolution cover art, and a 10-foot disc ripping client which seem popular these days. Life|ware is also set to make a splash at CEDIA with a new iPhone control application that … Continue reading Short Bits: Life|ware & Niveus at CEDIA

New Module Makes Power Monitoring and Control Within Reach of all Homeowners Surrey, BC – August 20, 2008 Today, Embedded Automation announced its mHome Power Management Module. The mHome Power Management Module, which provides real-time energy usage information and control functionality, is available as an add-in to Embedded Automation’s mHome products, including the award-winning mControl Digital Home Software and soon to be released mPanel Digital Home Portal. Initially supporting the TED (The Energy Detective) energy monitor, the mHome Power Management Module will scale to support other power measuring devices and future technologies such as “Smart Meter” solutions. The mHome Power … Continue reading Embedded Automation Announces mHome Power Management Module

Mary Jo Foley covers the mess that has been Fiji.  I’ll have more soon, but Fiji will go down in history as one of the worst coordinated projects to come out of Microsoft in a long time. On this week’s Media Center Show Ian Dixon has Automated Home’s Mark McCall talking Home Sever, Media Center, and of course, home automation. This is the first time the Olympics is making a big splash online, and if you have followed any of the press around it there are a lot of players involved this year.  Microsoft is clearly one of the top … Continue reading Short Bits: Fiji, Media Center Show, Olympics

Adding to the long list of mControl add-ins, drivers, and plug-ins is their text to speech beta driver that allows the Microsoft Speech API to make your Vista machine speak text as part of a macro.  The speech commands are specific to Windows Vista, so the client will not work on MCE 2005 (the controller part of the driver should work on MCE 2005 however). Source code and documentation are also included in the download.

So you have a Sony DVD Changer that doesn’t include the ability to stream to Extenders.  What do you do?  Forget keeping the discs in the changer and just batch rip them using Casey Chesnut newest project /dvdMassRip. Embedded Automation has just released a beta driver for Universal Device’s ISY-xx controllers.  Currently supported are the ISY-26 and ISY-99i INSTEON controllers, and the driver has been designed so that UPB and Z-Wave ISY controllers.

I’ve been extra busy the past week and have kind of skipped covering everything that I wanted too, but now I’m back! Check out part 4 and part 4 of the Media Center University sessions at EHX.  In these two sessions Todd Rutherford from Microsoft covers everything from online streaming and downloading of content to controlling Media Center in a whole home environment. In last week Media Center Show Ian Dixon and Ted Singh covered Embedded Automations upcoming mPanel touchscreen.  I’ve got a post coming on SideShow later, but to get a glimpse of that you just have to see … Continue reading Short Bits: Media Center U, Media Center Show, SideShow, More

VidaBox Releases the vController – a Solid, Feature-Rich Hardware Solution Integratable with Software-Based Automation packages‏ Westbury, NY – July 17th – VidaBox is excited to offer the vController, a powerful rack-mountable automation solution. Designed for heavy-duty automation, it comes standard with four USB ports, dual Ethernet Ports, VGA video out, and two standard RS-232 ports. Optionally, it can be configured with up to nine RS-232 ports for the most demanding of integration projects. “With the growing popularity of PC-based automation platforms, integrators have been looking for a solid, pre-built hardware solution where they can reliably run their software,” explains Steven … Continue reading VidaBox Releases the vController – Hardware Solution Integratable with Software Automation

Last month mControl gained support for CentraLite JetStream, and this month UPB has been added to the growing list of supported lighting and home control systems in Embedded Automations mControl. The beta driver, developed by mControl user Tom Boyce allows control of UPB devices by all of the mControl form factors.   UPB works much like X10 and INSTEON in that it uses power line communication to control devices with ~99% reliability.  The beta driver does have an expiration date (Aug. 31, 2008), however the final version should be out later this summer.  Download the driver here. Embedded Automation has also … Continue reading mControl Gets UPB Driver; mPanel Beta Units Out