OSMO to the Rescue

We've had a Roomba practically from the day they came out. We got it from Sharper Image with a 3 year extended warranty (which typically aren't worth it). Within a couple years, though, it died and with the warranty, we got a brand new Roomba Discovery. The warranty paid for itself in this case. The last few years, however, it has seen little use as it developed a problem where it makes the "uh-oh sound" + 4 beeps after spinning in circles. Recently, I decided to Google the problem, and discovered it's a well known issue with an easy fix. iRobot will send you a device called OSMO, which plugs into the Roomba's serial port, and does some reprogramming. Not only did it fix the problem, but it appears to have upgraded the programming all together and our Roomba works better than ever. iRobot is a pretty awesome company to provide support for an out of warranty, 6 year old Roomba!

SageTV 7 Upgrade

Just installed the SageTV 7 upgrade over the weekend and it was painless. I made a backup of my SageTV 6 directory, then removed the plugins from the original JARs directory. Then I installed version 7 right over the original install. It kept all the settings and recordings. Finally, I installed the various plugins and it is considerably easier to do in this version. The UI is much snappier on the HD200 extenders as well. Also, my xPLSage app worked flawlessly with the latest SageTCPServer plugin. I did do a few tweaks to it and solved the xP crashing issue, so it should be ready for release soon.

xPL SageTV Plug "out"

This weekend, I started work on a new mechanism for controlling SageTV via xPL since my original Java based plugin no longer functions on Win7. It's a plug "out" instead of a plug-in since it runs outside of SageTV as a separate app. It communicates via TCP sockets with the SageTCPServer plugin. I've got it working with multiple clients and also forwarding osd.basic messages to the SageInfoPopup plugin as my old plugin did. It seems to work well so far, however, oddly, it crashes on XP but doesn't on Win7. I'm going to continue testing for a while before releasing it.

SageTV Server Upgrade

After dealing with Server 2003 on the DVR for the last two years, it's time to move on. It had all sorts of idiosyncrasies that desktop OS's don't have to deal with - such as having to hunt down drivers for audio and hacking in bluetooth drivers, but one of the main irritations was that certain software won't install on server OS's. I've made the jump to Windows 7 Pro and have been gradually installing bits of things. Unfortunately, one thing that one make it is my xPL plugin for SageTV. The plugin is written in Java and relies on the xPL4Java package. xPL4Java doesn't work on Windows 7 for whatever reason and I've spent a few days unsuccessfully trying to get it working. Now, my Chumby control screens for SageTV will be on hold until I figure out a different method of control (I have an idea). Given this, I will probably be abandoning support for my xPL Plugin for SageTV.

While I'm leaving behind the SageTV plugin, I'm considering getting the SageTV 7 upgrade. Since it has new plugin architecture, I would either have to re-write the xPL plugin or abandon it. Hopefully, it will be a seamless upgrade.

Solar Update - 1 Year of Green Electricity

It's been a little over a year since our solar array went online. So far, it's exceeded the estimates I made (using my spreadsheet in this post) for every month. Even in rainy, cloudy December, it beat estimates - just barely. This month, I don't think we'll reach estimates as it's been an unusually rainy, cloudy March. Right now we're about 140 kWH short with 9 days left - and today it's been non stop rain.

In spite of the rain (we do need it badly though), we've been extremely happy with the investment. In one year, we've used 8,821 kWH of electricity with 5,796 kWH being provided by the panels. Over 65.7% of our power was provided by the sun. Our electricity pricing is tiered based on usage, where tiers 1 (<370 kWH) and 2 (370-480 kWH) are the lowest priced and most reasonable. Before solar, we were consistently in tier 4 (730-1100 kWH). With solar, we hit tier 3 once - in that cloudy December. We hit tier 2 in January. Every other month, we've been in tier 1 usage. From an investment perspective, the electricity savings have returned approximately 8.3% 9.1% tax-free, relatively risk-free and effort free! Can't complain about that. Plus the tax credit for 30% of the net cost (cost less California rebate) is coming in real handy right now as I'm doing our taxes!

If you're thinking about going solar, I strongly encourage you to really look into it. Get a few providers to come out & give estimates. Use my spreadsheet linked above. Think about it as an investment - like buying a stock - but solar provides a higher dividend that's tax-free and essentially risk-free.

Panel Builder Screenshot

I've finally had time to actually use Panel Builder. As I've been creating screens, I've been trying out new UI elements. The screen is actually generated by a PHP script. The script customizes elements based on what Chumby is making the request. For example, if my nightstand Chumby requests the lighting page, it automatically goes to the master bedroom lighting screen, but the family room Chumby will see the FR lighting first. All requests from the Chumby pass an option containing the requesting Chumby's device name. You can access this from PHP using:

$chumbyName=$_REQUEST['chumby'];

Gesture Control in Panel Builder

I've been playing around with gestures to control actions in Panel Builder. Here's a demo of what I've got working right now. It's very simplistic, only taking into account 4 directions of swipes. Although if you make diagonal swipes, both the horizontal & vertical action are executed, but I'll probably filter that out and make diagonal swipes unique actions.

Doghouse Labs Announces Our First Donor...Ever

I'm pleased to announce that Walter Krämbring of Sweden has become our very first donor. Walter's been a major contributor over on the EventGhost project and has been a big proponent of xPL over there ever since I polluted his mind by releasing the xPL plugin for EventGhost ;) Despite not having access to Insignia Infocasts, he donated the incredibly generous amount of $50 to the project. Since the $25 threshold was met, as promised, I will add in a feature to add a webcam view to Panel Builder. I will also put in a slide show screensaver which I think will be great feature. Furthermore, I plan to use $20 of Walter's donation to "Pay it forward" by purchasing a Silver membership at Cocoontech.com. I don't need or use the benefits of the membership, but I'd like to show my support for CT as Dan aka electron has built a great Home Automation community over there and invested a ton of his time & money.

Once again, thank you Walter Krämbring!

Announcing xPLChumbyTTS

I've modified our xPLAudreyTTS application to send TTS to your Chumby or Insignia Infocast. Visit our website for details.

Free Software...What's It Worth To You?

I've always benefited from free software, like MySQL, Apache and lots of smaller applications. I think I've done a good job of paying back either by donating time or money or with my own software. Lately, I've invested a lot of my free time into writing my Panel Builder app for the Chumby platform.

It wasn't easy. I had to learn how to write Actionscript, learn how to use FlashDevelop and scoured the 'Net for code bits to help me along. As part of my learning process I wrote a couple Chumby apps before I thought of doing Panel Builder. I kept those apps private for use on my own Infocasts, as I debated whether or not I wanted to deal with supporting a public app. After all, once an app is released, people are going to want help using it or want features added, especially, if it's free software. Obviously, that takes even more of my time.

I think Panel Builder is a great app and I'm really proud of my work. I've received a lot of positive feedback and thanks which has been great. It's nice to see people write about how they now have this super touch panel that cost so little (but don't forget the 100 hours of my time). I do think Panel Builder's also at a point where it has a substantial set of features that allows you to make some very complex & flexible control panels - all for free. I'm debating whether to stop adding new features and just doing bug fixes from now on.

However, there are more features I think that could go in to make Panel Builder even more useful. A few of them:
- Built in slideshow screensaver pulling photos off your network
- Updating status labels for displaying temperatures, song tracks, etc.
- Ability to add a webcam view to a screen

So, I'd like to pose a question. What would these or other new features be worth to people? The reason I ask is that nobody's ever clicked the Donate button on my website in the 3 years I've been developing software - no matter how many features requests I've done or how much help I've provided with my apps. If nobody voluntarily donates, would they donate to unlock features?

Let's try an experiment. For a $25 total in donations, I would add the feature to add a simple webcam view to Panel Builder. How will this work? You donate what you think this feature is worth. $1. $5. Whatever. When the total of donations reaches $25, I'll release an update to Panel Builder letting you put in a simple webcam viewer (The webcam must have a URL which will return an image when accessed). Want a different feature? Propose it in a comment below.

If there aren't any donations or comments, then I can assume Panel Builder is perfect the way it is and I can move on to other projects. There's obviously details to work out. Tell me what you think in the comments.

PS. I just wanted to add that my frustration really stems from users who ask for feature after feature and have offered nothing in return. I'm not talking about monetarily either. I really appreciate the efforts of others who've also been hacking the Infocast and revealing what they found about the file system, or system calls, or have given back by making their own wares available (not necessarily Infocast related either). Granted, not everyone's going to have the skills to do these things, but maybe they should find another way to contribute instead of just taking?

Another Chumby App Preview - Real Time Power Monitor

Here's a short video that shows an app I'm playing around with to graph the data from our Brultech ECM-1240 power monitor. The app uses the typical fetch of a URL with XML data that Panel Builder uses to bring data in. The URL actually points to a PHP script that queries a MySQL database for the power readings and returns it formatted in XML. It does this every second using the SetInterval construct in ActionScript.

The Brultech monitor has 7 channels and is interfaced to using a custom VBScript running in our xPLSerial app. The script takes care of the handshaking with the hardware and writes the channel data to our MySQL database. Another thing the script does is send the readings over xPL to our xPLGPower app, which connects to Google's PowerMeter.

Dear Google, Am I Really Getting A Cr-48?

I was one of the thousands of users of who were bombarded by sudden burst of emails from Google's Chrome Notebook Pilot program users group (detailed here.) I did apply for the pilot program months ago, but have not received a notebook...yet. I am hopeful, as I received an email from Google apologizing for onslaught of emails. A key sentence from the apology is If you are receiving this email and have not yet received a Cr-48, you should be hearing from us soon. Apparently, there is no notification if you were chosen, other than coming home one day to find UPS dumped a box on your porch with a Cr-48 inside. Surprises are nice, but c'mon Google, give us a tracking number so someone can be around to receive the item. I wonder how many Cr-48's have "walked off" their intended owner's porch. One would figure it'd be trivial for someone at Google to write a Python script to automatically email pilot program applicants a tracking number as their Cr-48 shipped.