When you love something so much – as much as this guy Pascal likes Star Trek’s LCARS UI – that you recreate it down to the smallest detail, you’d better be willing to go all the way. While he has skinned Windows to look like a screen on the deck of the Enterprise, why doesn’t he have his girlfriend dress up like a Klingon? Why aren’t there tribbles in his kitchen? Where is the Borg? WTF, Pascal. You don’t cut and run when it comes to religion.

In all honesty, this is probably the coolest home automation system I’ve seen and I’d totally hire him to wire mine up. I’d get mine to look like the UNIX SYSTEM from Jurassic Park, though, complete with a giggling Newman.

via Giz

100% touchscreen remotes tend to be a nightmare mostly because the UIs tend to look like something out of a bad sci-fi movie. (that’s a bad thing) They’re so bad that dedicated hard buttons are often built-in to make up for their shortcomings. Remember watching The Osbornes. Yeah, Ozzy isn’t that big of a dope head — the controllers just suck that bad. I guess it could be both, really.

Crestron’s iPanel was then developed for the iPad to help compensate for their software, which is not actually horrible for a change. The iPad slips into it and then takes over the duty of volume control, navigation, and a few other functions with buttons found on either side of the screen. Cop-out for developing a killer user interface? Sure, it is. But according to CEPro, the target price is $500 so clearly the goal here is revenue and not providing the best user experience anyway.

Using the Bitwise Controls controllers and modules you can cook up all kinds of groovy home automation solutions: “control and monitor AV equipment, shades, lighting, and more via IR, Relays, RS232, and GPIO”.

Read the Residential A/V Control System success story for inspiration. Share your own home automation success stories here. Maybe we’ll interview you!

Via Mavromatic.

To take advantage of this, Arkados has released a reference design for making interactive software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a cool idea, being able to turn on the fan in your living room from across town with just a piece of hardware you’re already carrying with you.

Right now it’s just for the audio systems the company helps with, meaning you can control your entire music library from room to room with your iPhone as a remote. If you entertain often or just like each room to have its own ambience, it’s a great idea. In the future, when it’s more fleshed out, it’ll be like the Jetsons.

My vast collection of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck and other fine wines is so disorganized that I don’t know what do do anymore nor do I know what the temperature is like or what my stocks are doing. Enter Runtriz. A touch screen-based system that catalogs your wine cellar, provides up to the minute news, weather and stock info all at your finger tips. No clue what to make for dinner? Don’t worry. Runtriz has a recipe feature to help you out and based on the recipe you choose, it automatically sends a text and/or e-mail so you know exactly what to get when you’re at the grocery store. Cool, huh?

The system is available in a 12- or 15-inch model that can be placed in any room throughout your home. Packages start out at $7,000 and can be customized to suit your needs. There’s also a monthly fee of $10 to keep the system up to date and programmed just for you.

Check out the site for a demo.

The Push Button Manor in Jackson, Michigan is about as old school as the concept can get. The modern (for the time) house was equipped with analog mechanics of the “future”, things like windows that close automatically during rain, remote control drapes, and automated dressing table lighting. What’s great is that the home’s owner made all the stuff DIY. Make, eat your heart out.

Many of these devices are things we’d take for granted these days, but at the time of grand engineering, a man building these devices into his house wasn’t geeky, it was “Genius”. Now if we could convince the signif to let us try our hand at this, we’re all set.

Push Button Manor [Modern Mechanix, via Boing Boing]