Last chance to control your home with nCube

nCube is a home hub that connects to your home network and then allows you to control devices in your home through the nCube app.

It works with lots of home devices such as Nest thermostat, Philips Hue and LIFX lights, sonos music and Belkin WeMo plug-in & lightbulb products.

Protocols supported are WiFI, Bluetooth and Z-Wave.

The device is secure (the phone app must be set-up on the home network) and the nCube device uses a VPN into the nCube cloud services.

As well as being functional the nCube app is designed to be easy to use and has won several design awards.

The nCube Kickstarter campaign finishes in 3 days so get backing, it's still possible to get one for an early bird price of £99 (it will retail for £139).

Sonos BU130 bundle

I should have written about this a long time ago, but now is the time for the Sonos kit to go.

The bundle consists of two ZP80 players and a controller, Sonos also threw in a controller cradle. The kit is very well built and feels very solid. Power supplies are built into the units, but are not auto-sensing, so ensure they're set to the right voltage or smoke will follow.

The Sonos software is relatively easy to install (it's a shame they don't support other streaming software like iTunes or Slimdevices Slimserver as they were already installed), however the software will pick-up iTunes playlists that have been created under iTunes.

The players work well, though they're not as good as the Slimdevices Transporter (but then they cost a lot less), however saying that, the Sonos controller is fantastic with a lovely display (that displays cover art) and "feels" like using an iPod.

The ZP80's need to be connected to amplifiers (they have analogue and digital outs - both optical and co-ax), there's also an analogue in that converts to digital formats (compressed and uncompressed).

Sonos also sent a ZP100 which has a built-in amplifier, it's very heavy!!! Again it feels like a quality unit and has four solid speaker posts to connect to speakers (Sonos supplied their SP100's which are very solid bookshelf type speakers). They are a bit on the high end and could do with a sub-woofer if heavy bass is required (the ZP100 has a sub-woofer output).

Various music services are directly supported by the controller (Rhapsody, Emusic and others) and it can also mount music stored on a NAS (network attached storage) using Microsoft file sharing (CIFS). Again it's a shame it doesn't directly support other streaming formats such as Slimserver, iTunes, UPaP etc as the NAS could directly output these and as the NAS was in a MS domain, mounting shares wasn't as easy as it could have been.

Altogether though the Sonos kit is recommended (though I still prefer the Slimdevices kit), though the controller beats the pants off the Slimdevices stuff. The BU130 bundle now retails for £699 (or $999 in the US) and would make a nice edition to any home.