Home automation integrated ?

by **ThE ScReW** on Sat Mar 13, 2004 9:58 am

Now xlobby works over the internet, I tought to write a plugin for sending 1 or 0 signals to the parallel ports, this for home automation but i started thinking :

Steven is such a good programmer that he can do this in a couple of minutes so maybe it would be simple and nice if you could add some events like Parallel port pin 1 : enabled of disabled and also add a couple of timers and a clock so that your program will a again stronger in his sector, the best of all the htpc programs, so that we can do anything we want !

:roll:

What do you think about it?
If you could do that with xlobby, then i make a good tutorial how to make a parallel port connector with relais and leds on so people can connect anything to thier parallel port !

Greetzzzzzz

A website for controlling parallel ports : http://www.aaroncake.net/files/ look at the third alinea.

If you program it in qbasic that the thing you need to add is : OUT &H378, 5 ==> this is for pin 1 and 3

Look also here: http://www.uct.on.ca/

by **CouchPotatoe** on Sat Mar 13, 2004 3:54 pm

I also hope that XLobby becomes a complete HA front end as that is my main interest. It is a natural for this task. The AV is one part of that.
We have a great (free) protocol called xAP http://www.xapautomation.org and some great apps on sites like http://www.xapframework.net and http://www.mi4.biz that interconnect all manner of HA related items. A simple parallel port I/O program for xAP would be very easy and we have already more capable hardware I/O connectors for boards like the Phaedrus VIOM and X10 etc. We also will be supporting HomeVision as a hardware HA controller.

My next task is to investigate the linking of XLobby to xAP - and the possible intermediary use of Girder may provide a limited route- I need to investigate what data cna be sent bi directionally, I'm still on the learning curve XLobby wise with this it. However there are lots of opportunities that a direct linkage to xAP would provide including the ability to get any form of data into or out of XLobby - to execute scripts externally (ala Girder) and to monitor status and control devices. Also no specific device support needs to be coded for XLobby - you just need a xAP connector for the device.

Being a little late to this I believe XLobby is written in .NET and on one of the sites above we have a complete (mature) development environment for xAP written in .NET so maybe that's going to come in very useful. Obviously these sort of adaptions are a little way down the development focus just at the moment but it looks really promising. I am just working on some skins - with a little bit of a 'kludge' [aka WIP] to integrate some real world HA control/status monitoring over xLobbys screens. When I get to something presentable I'll post a screenshot. But I do have temperature & Caller Display working this way

Chris

by **ThE ScReW** on Sat Mar 13, 2004 4:14 pm

Very good

but wouldn't it be better to not have it as a plugin but to have it standard in xlobby?

I also don't wanna use another program for PVR use of my tv card, i want that xlobby can do that.

If i start xlobby, i never wanne see anotehr program at the foreground again !!!

by **noviceboy** on Sat Mar 13, 2004 4:24 pm

I also don't wanna use another program for PVR use of my tv card, i want that xlobby can do that.

Actually there are so many cards out there steven would never be doing anythinng else. If he builds any then he needs to build one for Analogue Tv(probably PVR 250/350) and one for DVB-s(using dvbcore) the rest need to be plugins. ( and probably one for the USA HDTV folks- fusion?)

by **CouchPotatoe** on Sat Mar 13, 2004 4:44 pm

In practical use xAP is just a protocol with some connectors (or plugins) that xAP enable devices - and most of these run as services so really you end up with just the visible 'front end' application and some interconnect logic/scheduler. Always there will be more and more devices needing connectors writing so this is one way of avoiding them to have to be hardcoded.

From a HA perspective having control of some I/O pins on a parallel port is very basic - it limits the number and types of I/O and also suffers signal level/isolation issues. As you get into HA your aspirations rapidly expand to many many devices and ideas so having the interconnect to things like xAP (or Girder to an extent) opens everything up. I think there is a Girder parallel port plugin already so you can do some of these thinsg already with XLobby.

An example would be that there is a xAP connector for the SlimDevices SliMP3 and Squeezebox mp3 hardware players and the Roku SoundBridge - and also the Barix Extstreamer. This would allow mutiple zone handling in hardware - and can also be offloaded from the server PC (to a SlimServer running elsewhere) - and true audio synchronisation. You also get for free things like text display capabilities on the players VFD screens and IR reception.

Chris

by **ThE ScReW** on Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:58 am

You can send commands to you printport by using the OUT command.
After this command resumes a hexadecimal witch needs to be the parallel port adres. Mostly this is 378 but it could also be 278 or 3BC.
After this port adress, needs the number of the pin. This isn't just the number but it works with bits.Every OUT has his value.Check the list below for the value. If you would like to make pin 1 and 3 high then this is 1 + 4 = 5 The command becomes : OUT &H378, 5. This command keeps working on the parallel port until you change it.
Pin number |Value
2 |1
3 |2
4 |4
5 |8
6 |16
7 |32
8 |64
9 |128
18 |GND : no value needed