Homeseer plugin

[Jay]

That makes perfect sense, looking at your app's utilization of .NET remoting. Will remove that stuff. Brilliant so far, Fletch.

[Jay]

Oops! Forgot why I asked that.

The hub reports your plugin activity as xAP events.

[fletch]

My best guess is that you have the xAP Homeseer plugin active, and the activity that originates from xlobby causes changes to Homeseer. And as a results gets sent out through the xAP interface of Homeseer.

[Jay]

Ha! That's exactly what's happening. Thanks.

[Jay]

yup, got it. I ended up sandwiching the status call between the on and off buttons for each event pair and it's obvious what is on and off.

Just added xseer to a fat client; bulletproof, as well. You sure this is a Beta?

Continuing to work top down from your docs. I see that a delimiter between fixed text next to status is not required for an On/Off button, as you've included the toggle function as a call from your plugin. That saves scripting. Now I have an (e.g.) 'Outside Amp' trigger (toggled) function followed by the status. This saves page space relative to Event on, Status and Event off buttons.

No issues yet. Standby, HS Updater

[Jay]

Homeseer 2.x/X10 guys, you really need to try this plugin and open a dialog with Fletch for bugs (I've yet to find one) and suggestions.

Xseer gives XL a whole new level of utility.

[Bill Lott]

Works perfectly here. No issues. This definitely creates the best of both worlds - xLobby front end and Homeseer functionality.

Great work Aaron!

[Aaron]

Fletch (Aaron),
How far are you going to take the plug-in? I'm looking for an easy way to recreate the look/feel & functionality I have in my ASP pages. The images act as both button and status, are completely dynamic and use animated GIFs, and have direct dimming capability. It is not "pretty" since I'm no graphic artist but I'd like to be able to do the same thing in XLobby that I have done in ASP.

See my web link below and go to "Web based Home Automation controls"

[fletch]

Aaron,

I'm pretty much willing to take the plugin as far as needs and my ability allow. Is there a specific functionality that you're looking for? I've looked over the ASP pages from your web site. I think much of it could be replicated today with the plugin.

Currently the plugin allows you to control homeseer devices, execute a scripts in homeseer, and run homeseer events. Looking over your control panel I suspect this would allow most of what you're doing. It will also allow you to represent homeseer devices and their status in xlobby. The representations can be either a text or graphic objects.

Here's a couple of screen shots from what I have so far.



However ther is one big problem with this for you though. Unless things have changed I believe you're still running HS 1.7. This plugin will not work without HS2. It's using HS2's speaker application interface to communicate between itself and homeseer. As such there is no current way to control HS 1.7.

Aaron

[Aaron]

I'd be willing to upgrade to HS2 if there was a good reason... your plug-in may be the reason

On my web pages you can see a series of images representing the dim level of a light. I can directly choose the level and it will, of course, set the light and also refresh with the correct status level.

I really like having all my main control on a single screen and having the image show the status.

Can you add the ability to associate a series of images to a device, e.g. one image per dim level?

Do we have the ability to use animated GIFs?

[fletch]

Currently there is no graphical representation of the Dim level. However the text status will show the dim level. If you look at the second screenshot I posted on the right hand side I have the device status shown. For example if one of those devices had been dimmed to 75% instead of ON it would show DIM 75%. As for a graphical depiction, this is something I plan to add. One of the reasons it hasn't been implemented yet though is I haven't sat down to decide the level of granularity to go with. Are 5 levels of images needed? Maybe 10, somebody will surely will ask for a full 1% through 99%. I'm open to suggestions on this one so if you have an opinion on this let me know.

Direct dimming can be supported today you can go directly to 50% dim or any other level, not just up and down by some arbitrary value. I currently don't have a good way to set it to a variable value though. I assume you'd like something similar to the volume control, where depending on where you clicked on the control it would dim or brighten the device to that level. So today it would require setting up too many xlobby events to be something I consider workable. Honestly today to have that functionality with 1 light and 5 dim levels (20%,40%,60%,80% and 100%) you'd have to setup 5 xlobby events. Not great but it could be done. But when you start looking at even as few as 10 devices, you'd now be up around 50 events. So being realistic here the plugin will not do that yet. I have no reason not to add this at sometime in the future, but there are a few other things that need to be done first.

Finally animated GIF files do not work today either. They're displayed, but not animated. One of the people testing the plugin has asked for it, I plan to see what needs to be done for these files to display correctly.

[Aaron]

I use 10 levels for dimming when 0 is off and 10 is 100% on.

Not sure what you mean by "variable values" or why you think events are needed... My images each represent a direct dim level, no events used at all for dimming. I have a function that creates these "image arrays" on the fly, the only thing on my page that is manually created is the layout, all images/settings/status are all programatically done via vbscript.

you can download the pages from my web site (hover over the images for the link). take a look at the functions and run the pages to see the commands it sends homeseer... let me know what you think.

[fletch]

Aaron,

I agree that 10 levels is a good starting place. Which is probably where I'll start when I implement a method to visually display a dimmed device.

As for the events, I think you may have thought I meant homeseer events. When I was refering to xlobby events. I'm not aware of a method to pass a variable to a xlobby event. So I'd need to define an xlobby event to set a specific device to a specific dim level. For example one xlobby event could set the living room light to 40% dim. But I'd need another event to set that same light to 50% dim. So what would be required is 11 seperate events for each dimmable device. To me this just isn't viable. What I'd like to be able to do is create a single xlobby object to represent the dim levels 1-99%, then based on where the device is clicked it will dim the device to the desired level. So if I clicked on the object 45% of the way across the object the associated light would be dimmed to 45%. This obviuosly would require I can determine where on the device someone clicked. So I need to look into whether or not xlobby can provide this data, if not I'll have to figure out some other method to get this data.

I have downloaded your ASP pages but haven't had a chance to look them over yet.

Aaron (Fletch)

I figure I better add my username to my signature, lest someone think I'm talking to myself.

[BaddaBing]

Fletch,
All the positive reviews for your initial release tells me that I need to check this plug-in out. Any idea when you will post it for download or is this still by request only?
Thanks,
baddabing

[Jay]

BaddaBing,

he said he was going to be unavailable for a while - not sure how long. I've been using it for 2 months now and have found no bugs - in my implementation, anyway.

Hopefully, he'll resurface soon.