Housebot & XLobby - Some thoughts...

[Naylia]

I haven't actually gotten anything up and running but thought I might share some thoughts on combining the two. I think the approach I'm going to take is to get some HA hardware and get that up and running with Housebot on my HTPC. Then I'll add some new screens and events to xlobby that will issue commands via commandline to Housebot. Control of the system will then be excercised via xlobby's ppc client or my Harmony remote.

Issue with the above is that you lose the two-way capability since you only are using commandline from xlobby to housebot. But it's a start at least. However, I'm still not sure how much of an issue it will be as I think to begin I only want to do some limited things such as auto-dim lights on movie play.

Issue 2 is I'm moving this summer so I think I'm probably going to wait until we get to the new place before setting things up.

[AM]

Naylia, I would also love to integrate Xlobby with Housebot. At the moment I run both of them in parallel. I have split my touchscreen and have the Housebot software remote on the borders of the screen and Xlobby on the main area (see attached pic).

I am controlling several components (e.g. AV controller, scaler, DVD player) via RS232 and would not like to lose the two-way communication that gives me current status on the devices and drives some of the automation tasks (e.g. dimming lights when device is playing).

In my opinion, an integrated Housebot/Xlobby setup should leave all device control within Housebot (as you suggest) and Xlobby should be considered "just" as another device within Housebot. Xlobby would need to inform Housebot on ist status (e.g. playing music in zone 1) so that automation tasks can be performed accordingly. Would be interesting to see, if you can accomplish this with your suggested approach of sending commandlines to Housebot.

The big question to me is how to integrate Housebot's software remote with Xlobby's GUI...

Please keep on sharing your progress and thoughts on this!

[Naylia]

To get any type of two-way communication set up properly I think we'll need someone to write a plugin to XLobby for us....or get XAP support in Housebot.