AMEX Wishlist Goodies

I scored a few goodies from the AMEX wishlist promotion that was running. One of them was a $150 statement credit for a purchase from BestBuy. That went to buying a new HDTV. I also got a 25% off Amazon coupon - apparently it's good until 1/15/09 and can be used until the maximum discount is reached. Among things I got is the Antenna Direct DB4 antenna. It works great indoors bringing in HD signals that are over 40 miles from our house. I am contemplating other purchases to take advantage of this - possibly the HDHomerun and some Sage stuff (software & extender). Finally, a friend of mine snagged the Squeezebox Boom for me. It's very cool.

Shelved xlobby Plugin

I stopped worked on my xlobby plugin. I was hoping I could just drop msscriptcontrol into it to create a scripting engine for my plugin, but it xlobby doesn't seem to like it. After a couple days of getting nowhere, I put it on the backburner...

Jabber Re-Integration

I've finally completed integration of Jabber functionality into my xPL sCU app. I had coded it up months ago, but was too lazy to fully integrate it since I've been using xAP Jabber. Last night, I finally cleaned up the code and added response handlers in the xPL sCU hosted script. It's up & running so I've turned off xAP Jabber. I used jabber-net to build in the Jabber functionality.

Plugin for xlobby

I've been playing around writing a plugin for xlobby. I've used it before with the xAP plugin, but it wasn't very stable. I've since removed a lot of my xAP stuff. I do like xlobby's lightweight client for touchscreen applications, so I started toying with a plugin. I've been able to integrate xPL and access to mySQL into a plugin. This allows me to create xlobby events to issue xPL commands, and I can grab the status of everything in my system as its all stored in mySQL. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm going to want to script the responses from the plugin as some of the database contents need to be interpreted. I'll need to add a scripting engine at some point.

xPL Plugin for Event Ghost

I just threw together an xPL plugin for Event Ghost in a couple days. It allows you to add macros in EG that respond to xPL events and to send xPL messages in response to other events. I'm not a Python coder by any stretch, but I can hack my way through enough of it to be dangerous. Therefore, don't expect the code to be that great or readable.

Here's a couple of screenshots of it in action:



This one shows an event generated by the plugin. The format of the event is:
xPL.<message identifier>:<schema>:<source>:<target>:<xPL message body>

Obviously, you'll get billions of different events so that may make it more difficult to deal with on the EG side as there doesn't appear to be any wildcarding of events.



This screencap shows the configuration box to send an xPL message.

Download the plugin here. I don't have much time to support this, so good luck with it ;) You should understand xPL. If not, read and ask.

Current Sensing the DVD Player

I grabbed several split core current sensors off eBay and have been gradually deploying them. This week, I added current sensors to the family room TV, amp and DVD player. Now, when the DVD player is turned on, the system checks if the TV is on. If it isn't, it sends IR to turn it on. Then, it turns the TV volume all the way down since audio will be piped through the amp. Next, it checks if the amp is on and powers that up if it needs to and sets its input to DVD.

Update: I have taken all these current sensors off their DS10A's and ran Cat-5 to the gameport controller I use as a contact closure device.

Touch Pro Finally!

The wife & I picked up our matching pair of Touch Pros last weekend from the Sprint store. What a great phone! A beautiful 640x480 screen, full QWERTY keyboard, GPS, WiFi & EVDO Rev A. It's taking some getting used to having a slider keyboard and the Touch Flo interface, but I've been using Voice Command a lot more now. The UI is a little laggy at times, but I have been doing some performance tweaks that I've read about in various forums. It's been only a week, but overall, I'm really liking this phone.

Wetness Sensors

I jumped in and picked up a bunch of wetness sensors mentioned here. I'll be using them under sinks, behind toilets, under the water heater and the AC drip pan. These will work great with the eternal DS10A deal.

Haven't had much time for automation the last few weeks. I am experiencing major X10 noise problems for the first time. Three different light switches upstairs are intermittently controllable and one turns on by itself. I spent an hour unplugging just about everything in the house, but no luck. I tried changing house and unit codes too. It's very odd as everything was working great 3 weeks ago but I haven't plugged in anything new. Sometimes, device power supplies will all of a sudden start spewing noise onto the powerline, but those have been easy to track down & put on a filter. I'm a little stumped right now and considered replacing them the light switches with UPB ones, but they are so expensive.

Current Sensing the Dryer

I got a few of the current sensors mentioned in this thread to monitor if certain devices are powered on. The first one I used on the dryer. I opened up the small access panel where the plug is terminated (as mentioned here), disconnected a leg, peeled it apart from the rest of the power cable and inserted it through the current sensor. I turned on the dryer to test it out (it was on the 'air dry' setting), but the sensor didn't activate because the heater wasn't on. If I switched it to a heated cycle, the sensor triggered. So I had to move the current sensor to the other leg, which is active whenever the dryer is on. After putting everything back together, I attached the sensor output to a DS10A so that it can send the dryer's power status wirelessly. Now, whenever the dryer turns on, the laundry room exhaust fan turns on and when the dryer is done, the laundry fan turns off 2 minutes later.

Camera Server Efficiencies

Our CCTV system has been hacked and pieced together over the last 10 years and became more convoluted than necessary. Now that the Avermedia setup is running, I've been able to simplify things quite a bit. Our system previously used an IR controllable 4-1 composite video switcher to select an active camera based on user input or motion sensors. The automation server would use this feed to take snapshots of the activity. Each camera was also modulated so we could view them on our TVs or Slingbox. Now, the Avermedia records all 4 cameras based on its software motion detection. Also, the software is running full screen as a quad viewer. Since the server is headless, I've connected a VGA to composite video converter and modulated that output. This allows me to remove 3 modulators and the video switcher while still allowing the automation server access to all 4 cameras (albeit smaller views). Finally, an old series 1 TiVo was recording the camera feed continuously and that too got turned off along with its modulator.

Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS

I bought a few things off of eBay of late, taking advantage of the 30% cashback from live.com. One of those things is Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS. It's a very simple NAS device that takes an IDE drive up to 1TB and has both a 100 Mbps ethernet connection and USB 2.0. Performance is not great - it looks like it sinks about 15-20 Mbps, but that's OK for my needs. Another annoyance is it uses FAT32 so file sizes are limited to 4GB. On the plus side it's fanless and quiet, relying on its aluminum casing to dissipate heat. Unlike a lot of cheap NAS cases, this one features a configurable idle period before the hard drive is powered down. For me, this is a key as the NAS is just for weekly backups run in the middle of the night. I suppose I could put it on an appliance module and power it on and off when I need it. I'll measure its power consumption later today.

Update: It uses 4 watts with the drive powered down and 11 watts with it active.

Airave Update

We've had the Airave a few weeks now and it works nicely. We've now got a solid signal for our Sprint phones and the quality is very good. Dialing out takes about 1-2 seconds longer, but incoming calls are seamless as is the transition to regular cell towers when we leave home.