Tired of your kids kicking your remote under the couch or stuffing it into the laundry basket? Kurt R has an answer. What’s that, you say? Your welding skills are a little rusty? Well, if you don’t have a spare anvil lying around, all is not lost. We at ThinkFlood have been working on a [...]

This morning Curtis Silver posted an interesting article in Wired’s GeekDad blog in which he asks the question, “Who controls the remote in your house?” Curtis makes some interesting arguments for restricting control to certain people, for example:
My children and many like them are forbidden from touching the many remotes that control the many devices [...]

According to a Crestron press release, their Mobile Pro app has been available for the iPhone since September 22. It’s about time — Crestron has been promising this app since the 2008 CEDIA Expo just over a year ago. As of today, it doesn’t seem that anyone has downloaded or reviewed the app on iTunes [...]

The CEDIA Expo starts tomorrow, so we expect this to be a big week for home automation and remote control news. To get things started, Global Caché has announced its new iTach line. Similar to their existing GC-100 products in basic functionality (connecting an infrared or serial device to your LAN), the iTach has added [...]

A couple of days ago Total Telecom ran an article by Dow Jones’s Roger Cheng about how mobile phones are becoming TV remotes.
This kind of convergence is all fine and good — I think it’s great that we finally have mobile computing devices that connect to more than just the voice network — but these [...]

I have to admit, the CRISTAL remote is pretty amazing. A multinational joint development effort between  Michael Haller’s team at the Media Interaction Lab of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and researchers at the University of Waterloo, the University of Tokyo, and Keio University, this futuristic remote control concept won the Emerging Technology [...]

Yesterday in ZDNet’s Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes revealed that despite owning a Harmony One universal remote, he still hangs onto seven other remote controls to handle functions that he can’t squeeze into the Harmony setup. Of course the Harmony One has an infrared learning feature, but even so, there’s not always an appropriate place [...]

Earlier this week Erica Ogg of CNET wrote about Vizio’s plans to bring the Internet to its new Via HDTV sets. In addition to a LAN connection (802.11(n) Wi-Fi will be built into the TV), Vizio will be providing a bluetooth remote with slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Erica writes that, “The remote design is almost a [...]

As MacNN reported yesterday, the USPTO recently granted patent 7,566,858 to Apple. This patent helps remote control systems “distinguish predetermined light sources from stray light sources” and relates specifically to the Apple TV.
Like the vast majority of home entertainment device remotes, the controller bundled with the Apple TV uses infrared [...]