Any tips on creating a Sage home automation skin

[IVB]

I know some of this is very software specific and I posted this in the CQC forums, but if anyone here has any experience with what works & doesn't work home-automation wise from within Sage, I'd love to hear it.

Now that the HDExtender is out, I'd love to be able to just have the Extender control some basic CQC stuff in the MBR, without resorting to a UMPC in that room.

I got on Beelzerob's queue to integrate Sage w/CQC via the Sage side, but I need to give him some guidance as to what we'd want to control from within a Sage skin, and what a UMPC would be best for.

I just mocked up the following screens, please note that I have no idea if any of this is possible so this may not be what's created in the end. But, it's easier for Beelzerob to research integration if I give him some specific areas to look into.

What do y'all think? Is this the right way to think of this? Due to the diversity of people's setups and equipment list, I don't think we have any choice but to go with a device-specific path. I also have no idea how Beelzerob is going to be able to tell which of these a given user even has installed, so this is really just a whiteboard exercise at this point.

I stopped after the main screen as I didn't want to waste too much time on something that may not be viable.

[mkanet]

Most home automation software provide command-line support (xPL or Girder). Any thing that you can do via command line, you can execute via a menu selection. My menus until just recently, were configured very similar to what you show n your screenshots via Girde (and previously xPL). You can execute these command lines via dynamic menus or SageMC (builtin).

[mickp]

Have you seen this?

Mick.

[IVB]

Thanks very much for the replies.

Yes, I have seen that HAL skin, it seems great but it also has a ton of stuff on it that could take a while to build.
Q1) Do I really need to put in the muscle grease to create menus/etc with all those options, or is that better suited for non-SageTV areas? What have you found to be particularly useful, and what have you found to be annoying? What should I not bother doing because it won't be useful?

Q2) ie, mkanet - do you have NetRemote screens where you really control most of your HA setup, with SageTV limited to a subset of functionality or another style?

Q3) How about innovative uses of remote controls - anyone using any buttons there to directly pull up given screens or other stuff?

What I noticed is that the initial path I'm thinking of for SageTV HDExtender screens looks remarkably similar to how I started creating my regular UMPC screens. I wasted HUNDREDS of hours on stuff that proved to be a hassle to use. But, it's hard for me to think about what I want to do on the extender since I haven't done anything to-date with it.

Thanks for reading, and any help you might be able to provide.
- Vivek
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p.s., if the above doesn't make sense, here's the parallel path I followed when I first started down the HA route. I initially went down the path of
1) creating a single screen or menu item for each device, and replicated my remote controls on the screen.
2) Putting every dang control on the screen, jamming it up, and making it confusing.


Here's the initial & then the current. (I'm using a "frame-based" concept, where the top & left are static across all screens.)

Step 1: Waste time creating screens that I literally *never* used. Always have a/v controls visible on left, even if it doesn't make sense to the screen you're on










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Now: Create "room-specific" screens, and only have a top frame, with the most commonly used stuff for that room. Minimize the use of direct device control, use behind-the-scenes automation for as much as possible. Use a button for a pulldown menu (a la the top icons in SageTV) for rapid access to a given screen.



Although, I do use this "overview" screen

[jaminben]

Looks very cool but confusing at the same time. However I would very much like to see this ported over to SageMC 16x9 but not with so much information, ie keep it simple and just have quick links to various items like lighting > lounge > lights\lamps on/off or lighting > lounge > preset movie lighting.

Does your system work with HAL or could it work with Girder?

[IVB]

If you mean the first 3 screenshots, that's my concern too. Those were what I wasted infinite time building. The last 2 are what I use now.

It's not a system I coded, i'm using a commercial high-end home automation engine (CQC), I just did some pretty point&click skin building. Think of HAL or Girder on steroids, add NetRemote on top, toss in a fully distributed network architecture and you'll still be far from what it can do. It's got a price point to match though, so it's really meant for folks who are interested in complete home automation. Folks that use CQC wouldn't have any need for Girder.

The current weakness with all things HA is the need to have touchscreens or UMPCs or other control devices. That's where I get excited about the HDExtender - by creating a bridge from CQC into Sage, I can use the extender for HA in a few rooms where I don't really need a touchscreen or PPC or ...

Beelzerob is also a Sagee who uses CQC, and he's the guy who wrote the Sage->CQC driver so folks can control Sage from within CQC. He's the one who's going to be building the reverse pipe, so we can control CQC from within Sage. Although technically this was possible before, and we could have used the MVP, it wasn't really high on anyone's radar. But, the advent of the HDExtender has changed that, as we can now use that device for the "nicer" rooms in the house where you'd definitely want HA controls but still may not want a touchscreen.

It seems like other than the HAL thread, folks don't seem to be doing this tremendously; i'll keep this thread updated with the alpha screen shots/progress we make if anyone is interested. We've begun batting around a few ideas about how to do this effectively, although serious coding won't begin until closer to Late Feb/March due to real life. Until then, we're focusing on figuring out what we'd want to actually do, and learning the appropriate tools (ie, I still don't know anything about SageStudio).

Exciting stuff, though.

[Crashless]

Well, it seems you have a couple of ways to tackle this problem.

You can create a dynamically displayed menu structure that pulls data from your HA server about each room and functions that would work for anyone that uses it with your software. Or you could create an application specific screen with a few options that you personally need, but would be of little use to anyone else if you tried to release it publicly.

Guess which one is more work.

If you build an application specific one, you just need to be able to make specific calls to your HA server and back. That is relatively easy to do within Studio.

The other way involves a lot more complicated coding than would be appropriate for me to type out right now. BUT, it would be very do-able, and you might even be able to leverage a lot of the Homeseer plugin's code in terms of widget creation and organization.

Best of luck to you!

[IVB]

Originally Posted by Crashless

The other way involves a lot more complicated coding than would be appropriate for me to type out right now. BUT, it would be very do-able, and you might even be able to leverage a lot of the Homeseer plugin's code in terms of widget creation and organization.

Best of luck to you!

Ok, hearing that some of this stuff is very do-able within Studio is getting me excited. And, one of the pro installers who's both a big CQC and SageTV fan had a great idea about how to genericize this, which is to have users create a config file with a list of the drivers and fiields they want to see within SageTV. The way CQC works, each person just names their driver with an english name (mine is called sample-zWave), and then names their lights (mine are LivRm,etc). The config file could have something like:

sample-zWave.LivRm
sample-zWave.DinRm
sample-HVAC.T1CurTemp (current temp of my thermostat)
sample-HVAC.T1SPHeat (heat set point)

Obviously we'd need to figure out how to determine what to display on what page, that's where the HAL Plugin/SageStudio studying is going to come in.

In the end, having something just for me & a few people isn't helping the cause of promoting HA; half the success I've had in my setup is because others have come onboard and pointed out how shortsighted my approach was, and how much of a better idea they had.

Well, i'm off to bed, but i'm going to have to start learning SageStudio first - the thought of extending my HA control to 2 rooms where I thought I was going to be forced to buy both a $700 UMPC and HDExtender has got me drooling. Perfect timing (for me) on that HDExtender, kicking me to start learning this before I stupidly purchased any more power-sucking PCs.