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Open-source iPhone plan to control your home

JBoss disrupter returns

Two open-source heavyweights and their team have announced a proof-of-concept milestone to control all your home gadgets from an iPhone and iPod touch.

The project, OpenRemote, is being shepherded by Marc Fleury whose middleware start-up JBoss ran circles around the closed-source app server big boys before becoming the subject of heated courtship by Oracle and Red Hat, and Mark Spencer of open-source Voice over IP provider Digium.

The OpenRemote community recently announced that it had created its first "end-to-end prototype," which uses iPhone Native Console software to send commands to the community's OpenRemote Box (ORB) over Wi-Fi.

The ORB, in turn, manages various home automation controllers. The working prototype uses IR, with X10 and KNX support scheduled to appear "soon."

A glance at the X10 website, which is chock-full of bodacious babes hawking cameras, security systems, lighting controllers and more, may not inspire confidence in the maturity of the home automation community. However, the OpenRemote folks really are serious developers - as might be evidenced by Fleury's experience with the JBoss Community.

With such a strong pedigree, and Fleury's reputation for plain speaking, it's a sure bet that the OpenRemoters aren't simply blowing smoke when they describe their end-to-end prototype as "a proof of concept that actually works (imagine that!)." ®

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