Free HTPC Software released : Digital Home Server

[Airbot]

A free Windows multimedia and home automation application is released, called the Digital Home Server (DHS). Thanks to the nice graphical interface, DHS looks great in your living room, where it can act as a media player.

DHS is a hobby project that has grown wildly in size, and started as a graphical interface for 7" USB monitors. The current version can handle any monitor size from 7" up to whatever, and the screen design will be adapted accordingly. Moreover, the layout is touchscreen compatible, so even on small monitors you can still easily control all functions.

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[soitjes]

It's been a while since I release the Digital Home Server, so I though I give a little update on the modules that have been released in the meantime :

Analog clock

DVD Player : play DVD from optical disk or local hard disk

Scribble Pad : a little drawing application

Wakeup module : set alarm time, and wake up with music

Picasa slideshow : photo slideshow with Picasa Web Albums

Notify My Android : send free notifications to your Android smartphone

I hope you like DHS as much as I do !

Soitjes.

 

[soitjes]

Release 2.0.7.0 is now available. It took me a lot of time, and development was interrupted several times for other things, but I finally was able to release my “Scanning and Archiving” module. I developed a solution that would allow me to scan all documents that come in by post directly in DHS. The basic idea is simple : you create categories (water, gas, electricity, …) and then create a document in a category. Then you can create pages, which you can do by scanning a paper document, or to import a file from disk.





You can then zoom in the page, print or export it and change the order of the pages.

One feature I wanted as well is the “unpaid invoice” tracking. When you create a document you can specify whether it’s an invoice, and whether it’s already paid or not. The number of unpaid invoices for each category can be followed using the widget, which you can place on your desktop.





All scanned pages can be accessed via the browser, because I do my online payments from a laptop, not on my main DHS server. So I need access to the invoices from other PCs as well.

The only real feature that is missing is OCR, especially because the database engine I use has a text search feature, so it would work great, but I simply couldn’t find a free OCR library, and I don’t need it urgently enough to justify the cost.

What’s next ? I have foreseen a general maintenance release with plenty of little enhancements that I wrote down the past year. Then a Home Automation prototype (development is ongoing) will be integrated in DHS. At that point I have home automation and multimedia together in one application, and plenty of ideas. Controlling audio in multiple rooms is very high on my list, as well as radiator control in rooms.

Have fun,

Soitjes.