AT&T & OpenPeak At CTIA
At CTIA this week AT&T announced the availability of OpenPeak's OpenTablet 7 on their network. Engadget has a nice long video interview with OpenPeak's CEO, looking over a lot of the product line.
Controlling Applications From Asterisk
Many thanks to Dave Michels who earlier today passed a link to this blog post from New Zealand’s James Forman about Controlling Applications With Asterisk. James’ project is an excellent example of the sort of thing that sets Asterisk apart from everything else. He used a multi-step process to have DTMF tones issue commands to control a VLC VideoLAN media player.
His approach is very similar to what I had initially envisioned for my home automation project. Where James is dealing with the VLC commands I was going to have the IVR process call AGI scripts that would cause xsend.exe to send predefined commands to various X-10 home automation modules. That was part one of the project.
Questioning The Future Of Home Phones
Many folks, including Tom Keating, Garrett Smith and Dave Michels are looking for a next generation consumer electronics device. Over the past while I’ve seen some enthusiasm expressed for the Open Peak’s prototype gadget. I hesitate to call this device a phone although the Open Peak prototypes appear to be a cross between a cordless phone system, a tablet PC and an iPod Touch. I certainly agree that it’s really pretty.
Vera, Z-Wave & I: Day 1
Today was the day that I finally got around to taking the Vera home automation system out of the box. It was a simple beginning as I have only one Z-wave device to control at present, a Monster Cable lamp dimmer. In about two hours I was able to get Vera on the network and upgraded to the latest firmware. I also had it controlling my one lamp. Woo Hoo!
Vera Home Automation
For the past while I’ve been thinking about extending my ancient X-10 based home automation. It wasn’t clear to me what technology was most appropriate but earlier this week my mind was made up for me. micasaverde announced their Vera home automation server based upon Z-Wave RF technology.