HouseBot

Ok Looking for suggestions on best method of acheiving this:-

I Have some spare ce tablets that I am going to mount in photo/picture frames around the house.. These will act as fixed control points for house ie running software remotes. I would like these to say after 3 mins of idle time revert to showing full screen pictures from either network or storage card.When touched I wish to activate the panel back to software remote. Windows ce 3.0 to 4.1 does not seem to have a viable screen saver option which is the obvious solution.
Your thoughts Guys?

The only thing I can think of is to look for WinCE software that would do this for you. It seems like there should be some screen saver-like applications that show photos after a period of inactivity.... somewhere.

Create a panel in your SWRemote with one screen filling dynamic image. On top place a screen filling transparant button. Write a script that randomly stores image names / paths from your library in this dynamic image and setup a trigger in the same script that resets a 3 minute timer once the transparant button is pressed. If the button is pressed, switch back to the panel that gives you control of your automation. Some logic needs to be created to reset the timer any time you use the SWRemote. If the timer hits 3 minutes, than trigger your running script again which opens the dynamic image panel.
With a constant running script, this should be fairly easy to setup.

Richard,

Great idea... wonder why I didn't think of it.

Who needs other software, when you can do it all with Housebot!

ScottBot wrote:Who needs other software, when you can do it all with Housebot!

Well said!!

Scott
Thanks for the reply and yes you would of thought a screensaver would be available. I could not find one.

Richard
Thanks for the heads up on the button idea. I had started down the road of a dynamic image after posting.However I thought I might have to have a panel change button,your idea of a full page transparent button is excellent and I will have a little play over the weekend to see how it works

Thanks again

Richard Naninck wrote: Some logic needs to be created to reset the timer any time you use the SWRemote.

I had thought about approaching this problem in the same way (transparent big button and all!) , but this is where I got stuck.. . how would you do this? Wouldn't you need to add logic to every button on every screen?

I know it is fairly easy to get windows variables through WMI using vbscript. I haven't searched for it yet, but I am sure the x and y coordinates of the mouse cursor can be polled somewhere. So write a small constant running script that triggers every second (or so) that compares the previous x and y coords with the current ones. If they have changed, the screen has been touched or a button is pressed (equal all the same). If not done using a constant running script, you could store the coords in properties and retrieve them again while running the script. Anytime the coords have changed, the 3 minute timer can be reset.

This is just one way that I came up with just now. I bet if I get into this a bit deeper there should be other possibilties as well. Such a mouse coords feature could even be native to HouseBot itself. (Feature request for V3.0)

markd wrote:

Richard Naninck wrote: Some logic needs to be created to reset the timer any time you use the SWRemote.

I had thought about approaching this problem in the same way (transparent big button and all!) , but this is where I got stuck.. . how would you do this? Wouldn't you need to add logic to every button on every screen?