HouseBot

According to the Memberlist, the following members have posted over 100 messages on this Community Forum:
acheslow
Circe640
dlmorgan999
ericvic
kbosscawen
kilowatt
MichaelK
PT
Richard Naninck
spike5884
Steve
Steve Horn
talisman
yaccri
Many of these members have been around for years and have, no doubt, accumulated a great deal of HouseBot experience.

My challenge to you, ladies and gents, is to post the scripts, themes, skins, and other resources you've undoubtedly created over time. Please share the fruits of your labour so that others may build upon your efforts.

HouseBot members are generous with their problem-solving skills but a wee bit stingy with their examples. Don't be shy; no one will be grading your masterpieces!

Here are some of my screenshots. I am only allowed 256K, so the quality is not too good and it shows only 4 of my 40 panels.

Richard:

Many thanks! Very impressive!

I'm not familiar with Dutch but I think I understand what the screens are monitoring/controlling.

Referring to the Informatie page:
1. How are you monitoring the Doorbell and Garage?
2. What is the source of the temperature data?
3. What is the source of the voicemail data?
4. How are you interfacing with the alarm system?

Thanks!

1. Right now using my own built wired micro controlled interfaces which became obsolete since I installed my new ELK M1 alarm system. The ELK can handle non alarm zones which can trigger garagedoor and doorbell sensors just like any other sensor. Opening and closing the garage as well as curtain control is now done by own built wireless 868MHz tranceivers that talk over the serial bus and control I/O using micro controllers.

2. I use the SMT 160-30 digital temperature sensors also connected to the tranceiver modules I built. PT uses the same sensors connected to some serial board which can be bought off the shelf!

3. The voicemail is interfaced with my XAN (German) ISDN voicemail program. The source is an ISDN PCI card in my PC. It displays CID info as well as pictures of users, a phonebook is incorporated and logs are kept. Also voicemail can be playing by using my theme.

4. Obsolete using my old alarm in combination with own built micro controlled interfaces. Now I use the ELK M1.

Richard,

How did you set up your Jukebox? I've seen the scripts for the winamp plugin, but you've gone way beyond the capabilities of that plugin.

-- Mike

I am directly controlling Meedio Essentials through HouseBot. So Meedio plays the music and HouseBot controls the database and play controls... The winamp plugin didnt work for me.

I agree. The Winamp plugin is limited in its ability. It would be a REALLY nice enhancement to Housebot to have a better media/jukebox plugin. It should almost be a core function. Scott? The ability to play and oganize music is a critical part of my system. I must say I liked the way ME handled this. I'm pretty impressed with what you've done here. How did you create the indexes and ability to sort by Artist, Album, or song using Housebot as the front-end instead of ME? Meedio Essentials used the import feature to do this. How did you get this to show up in Housebot sorted in a similar way? VB script? How did you get the album art to show up from Essentials?

I use meedio's libraries and use an sql dll to connect to it in vbscript. the coverart has a path in the same library and is displayed using a dynamic image. i use meedio's messages (windows message hook) to send and get messages from meedio. that gives me full control and feedback. with having the sql option, all meedio's data becomes available in housebot.

I agree that the WinAmp plugin is not a total audio solution, but will suffice for simple song playing.

Ultimately I think a great interface to MCE or even Meedio is what we need. I don't really want to re-write something as significant as a full media management application, so I think it would be best to just have an interface to the 3rd party software. I was hoping that was where we were headed in the Meedio days, but it looks like we're back to the starting line on this one.

Then you get back into the mode of who controls what from what. We spend a lot of time integrating it with some technology that continually changes or gets sold to the hightest bidder. Ideally, I would like to control everything from HB. I never understood why someone that used HB would want to have an ME connector that worked in reverse. Never made any sense to me. That said-- I have to say I really liked the way ME's import library worked. That functionality was very transportable to many applications (i.e, weather, music, video, rss, etc..) It would be awesome to have a similar function somehow tied into HB objects. I think it would integrate very well and negate the need to script all of these things. I think there are probably only 2 components needed to do this. The ability to read ID3v2 tags so you could sort music library by Artist, Album, Genre, etc.. And some kind of database to sort, search, and create playlists. I even think there is a freely available C library to do this. There is also a freely available C library for SQLite. I believe this is what Meedio used. Richard Naninck has written a scripts that reads the Meedio data directly, but that requires Meedio. As far as I know, the only thing Meedio's music library does when it catalogs music is create a table(s) that links the ID3v2 data to the music file. If I had a little time right now I would spend some time learning C++ and write a HB plugin, but I don't. This would be an awesome addition. Right now Cinemar charges $60 for Music Lobby and it still requires J River Media Center 11 and the core Main Lobby package.

I am a heavy meedio user. I use it to play movies, record TV, show pictures, play music and watch the weather.
I don't want to switch on my plasma screen to play some music or watch the weather real quick, but I do need my plasma or beamer to watch TV or a movie. So Meedio (or any other PVR) would always be needed in my opinion. So if Meedio is already in the equasion, it makes perfect sense for me to use it at its best. It already has a music player and it has a server that collects (imports) movie trailer data, weather data, tag imported data etc etc. A little bit of scripting and two 3rd party pieces of software (SQLite 2 and something to get a windows handle in vbscript) is needed to get it going. It is all freeware. Now I can use HouseBot and my touchscreen to see the weather and play music, but also I can select a movie trailer or home video or recorded tv program using my touchscreen while playing it on the plasma or beamer. Doing this with HouseBot enables me to have all other HouseBot related pro's in the loop such as switching on the Plasma, switching off the lights, closing the curtains and whatever have you to make the best of your entertainment. HouseBot controls it all and Meedio just takes care of the output and that is something HouseBot should not get good at because it will become too heavy that way.
I am willing to share what I have built and maybe in some ]time with some other people (like Scott) we could come to something generic. I am meedio based and don't want to spend time on MCE. For me meedio works until HD TV becomes more popular, but then I think Yahoo would be a good follow up since it uses the same core and I am willing to bet that all my scripts will still work. The setup is very agile meaning I don't experience any slowdown due to the fact it is only a script and not a precompiled C plugin.

I really apologize for getting off-topic in this thread, but this is really a good discussion. I'm merely suggesting that making the jukebox feature a core function, or even a plug-in, would extend the product and might open up the product to more potential users. Meedio is not an option for HB users who don't already own it, and it's a dead-end product. I'm certainly not suggesting something as full blown as Meedio. I would be willing to contribute my time developing a media player skin (slightly on-topic) and make it available to HB forum users if someone is willing to work on a plug-in for this. I would even be willing to help on developing the plug-in, but I have to warn that I'm not an experienced C++ developer--although I did start my post academic life as a software developer. I do own a license for MS Visual C++, and I have run a successful build on the sample that comes with the SDK. That's as far as I've gone.

In response to the original post, I have a few screenshots but I'm not able to get them any smaller than about 1.6MB total. If there is a way to post them I'll do so - otherwise I'll be happy to answer any questions.

I am not any kind of artist so I'm just using the built-in controls and artwork. Right now I'm stressing function over form. I would love to have a nicer look and feel but I'm hoping we'll see more graphical type contributions from users in the future.

Also, this post gives more details on some of the things I am doing with my setup.

I'm interested in seeing how HouseBot has been applied; I certainly won't be critical of aesthetic choices or programming style! Please feel free to share whatever scripts/screens/devices you have to offer.

Richard's screenshots have demonstrated an integration between HouseBot and Meedio that I never imagined. It has opened my eyes to new levels of communication among household equipment.

Scott:
Based on some of the responses, I assume there is a limit to the size of attachments. If this is the case, what is it and can it be increased exclusively for this thread?

Another possible solution that might be really useful would be to create another forum dedicated to the discussion of themes. Ultimately it would be nice to have an upload section similar to what Meedio had with MAID but something like that takes a lot more work. If another forum could be created *and* that forum had a more generous upload limit that would be really nice and it should be pretty easy for Scott. It might also stimulate a bunch more discussion.

-- Dave