Vitrea, Maker of Elegant Glass Touchpads, Launches Home Automation at ISE

Vitrea continues to make sleek touchpads for third-party home control systems but the company is launching at ISE 2015 its own controllers, including one based on ZigBee technology.

When we first met Israeli-based Vitrea two years ago, we wondered if it had the best user interface at ISE 2013. The beautiful glass touchpads could be customized to control home automation systems from Crestron, Vantage, RTI, Lutron (QS series), Control4, and a number of systems based on the European KNX standard.

Fast forward and now several control manufacturers are making similar products—many of which are on display at ISE 2015 this week in Amsterdam, and some of which are OEMed by Vitrea.

But Vitrea has some new tricks up its sleeves. This year, Vitrea is showing the same gorgeous pieces of glass – now in single-gang designs for the North American market – but also its own home controllers.

First up is a simple touchpad with Wi-Fi communications and an iOS/Android app. If a user simply wants to control a few loads of lights or shades, this is the way to go.

For a fuller control system, Vitrea just released in January the VMax all-in-one controller (approx. $1,700 MSRP) featuring:

12-module DIN controller
16 general purpose outputs
2 outputs for 0-10 dimmers
4 relay inputs
IP, RS-232 (one) and RS-485 (two) two-way communications
iOS and Android apps
Astronomic scheduler
Wireless expansion module for Vitrea’s Aranet RF controls
Most recently, Vitrea has created an entire wireless mesh-networking platform, called Aranet, that is based on ZigBee.

Wired and wireless products can be mixed and matched in the Vitrea systems.