X10 support?

[kolemieux]

I see so many of the great skins with X10 entries, and was wondering what people were doing for X10 support - and or screens - specifically FireCracker? any advice on a plugin to keep the feel within Xlobby.

Thx

[jowaldo]

I use it right now with girder, since there are so many x10 girder firecracker plugins. There are plenty of open source programs to control firecracker devices, so for anyone with good programming skills (not me) should have a good start with those.

For now girder works good for me tho

[galtigor]

Well just for fun and to brush up on my C# skills I'm going to take a crack at an x10 plugin. Turns out that HomeSeer provides two ActiveX controls free of charge to allow you to write your own interfaces to the CM11A and CM17 x10 interfaces. I'm going to take a run at hooking this up through Steven's Plugin API.

Should be fairly easy as most of the hardwork will be handled by the Active X objects.

Greg

[jowaldo]

Awesome... let me know if you need any help testin it out

[kolemieux]

I WOULD LOVE TO TEST THIS...... certianly let me know if you have anything rough to test when u begin to make progress.

Thanks a ton.

[galtigor]

Ok,

Well I started my investigation and it seems straight forward enough. The only thing I'm trying to figure out now is how variables get passed to the plugin. There seems to be a variable field provided in the Event Manager for passing variables. (In my case it would be the house and control codes) but I can't seem to access it. I think it's done via the GetVariables command but I'm not sure. I could hardcode all the possible code combinations but I don't think I should need to to do that.

Steve can you shed some light on this?

thanks,
Greg

[stevenhanna6]

There seems to be a variable field provided in the Event Manager for passing variables.

that stuff gets passed along to the Execute function. If you have an xlobby plugin command it will trigger that plugins Execute function.

GetVariables, is used to get a variable or object from the plugin...like if you have a text box that wants access to an image in the plugin it would call GetVariables.

I'm not what your trying to do exactly, maybe you could write it out in more detail.

[galtigor]

In the event manager there are three entries for calling a plugin:

Plugin
Command
Variables

What I want to know is does the Variables entry provide a way for the event manager to send data to the plugin?

If so how do I access the information on that line in the plugin?

For example say I want to have an event like this:

Plugin = x10
Command = Light Off
Variable = A07

So in this example the Light Off command would be sent to the A07 Lamp module shutting the light off.

Thanks,
Greg

[theendisnye]

I have been doing X10 through XPL using the command line run program. This is a bit crude but works reasonably well and with XPL running I have the ability to run schedules, macros and conditional statements. The command line is a simple execute command 'x10send.exe' and an argument form of ' /command=on /device=a2 /level=10'.

A plug-in XPL interface would really be something.

Steve

[galtigor]

XPL? Not familiar with that. Have you got a link to it? This ActiveX control does have some problems (seems to crash regularly), so I wouldn't mind taking a look at an alternative.

Greg

[theendisnye]

There are three or so web sites but here is the key one http://www.xplproject.org.uk

I use;

XPLHAL MANAGER to create macros and conditional events.
XPLCM12 to interface into the CM11/12
X10SEND to send X10 commands from the command line
X10 TTS for text to speech
and I am still looking at other bits so that I can turn on fans if the weather gets hot, using the weather plug in or temp plugin etc


there are some guides which I used to get started

http://www.xplproject.org.uk/modules.ph ... es&secid=3

Steve

[badubo]

What I want to know is does the Variables entry provide a way for the event manager to send data to the plugin?

Yes, in fact command and variables are concatenated together and send as argument of the execute method of the plugin.

[galtigor]

Thanks,

That was the last part of the puzzle I was having problems with.

Greg

[galtigor]

Well it's done and it works with a test program. However it doesn't seem to want to load into Xlobby. I've got all the interfaces needed and it is inheriting Steven's control....

Any help would be nice.

[Chicoo]

The three main things that I can think of are:

- Make sure the plugin is in the plugin directory of Xlobby
- Give the plugin a name through the GetName property. If it does not have a name it will give an empty line in the plugin screen.
- Have the XpluginSDk.dll in the main directory of Xlobby.

These are just some small points that I can think of and that I ran into when creating a plugin.