My current thinking for touchscreens - on the cheap w/ pluto

[shenandoah75]

I've been reading the doc on Pluto tonight and though the UI is iffy, it's free. There were a couple of posts i read last year on this, anyone else using it now?

What i would like to do is have 2/3 computers... 1 would be running the core and serve as a director (which would serve the whole downstairs audio zone and home theater), the others would be directors only (similar to what MainLobby allows) serving audio only to my choice of master bed / / shop / garage. Using 2/3 receivers for selecting source, etc.

The only thing i really want is for both computers to have touchscreen interfaces liek viewsonic's airpanel would offer with sindows.
wyse.come and devonit.com both seem to have some offerings (but the latter only has one linux touchpanel thinclient and it's 17" little big!)

Any other options for non Windows-CE based touchscreens?

thx
-brad

P.s i'm not ruling out the window-based ones just yet, but just looking. Porting to multiple OS's would make the other more appealing to me (not even so much about the price)

 

[roussell]

I tried Pluto for a while and never could get used to it's UI, plus for true automation it needed something else (like MisterHouse) to make it complete. I'm not sure if that's still the case since I have looked at it in over a year.

If you haven't completely ruled out Windows-based HA yet: For high quality bang-for-the-buck it's hard to beat HouseBot. It's only $59.99 USD and the amount of control you get for that 60 bucks is amazing. There is a 30 day trial so you can try it out, and a new version is just around the corner (in private beta now). Check out the forums to see what others have done, there are some nice examples of GUI interfaces there. The touchscreen portion (called a swremote) runs on many WinCE devices. I use it on my Cingular 8525 phone and on a few windows-based touch screens around the house. BTW, that $59.99 lets you run one server, and as many clients as you want.

For the record, I'm a *nix guy. 9 of the 11 computers in my house run on either Linux, FreeBSD or OS X. The only exceptions are my wife's laptop (she's a Real Estate agent and the MLS web page doesn't render well in Linux/Firefox - but she's getting a Mac ) and the HouseBot server. On the HB server, I run nothing but Housebot and it's associated scripts, etc to make it work. I'm toying with the idea of moving it to a virtual session on a Linux server though. The PC based touchscreens run the HB swremote in Linux through a wine session (not officially supported, but it works well)

Terry