HAServer

• GUI Application rather than a console / service application
• Supports plugins
• Supports JSON-RPC
• Schedule Tasks
• Event triggered Tasks

Feel free to join our Google Group.

Google Group : https://groups.google.com/group/hasystem?hl=en-GB

I gave them a go, ordered the 10mb service well in advance to avoid being without internet at the new house however they messed that up. For a start the nearest installation date was a week after moving in and the day before installation they advised they couldn’t install it just yet as they needed to do some work before they could come around, apparently 2 1/2 weeks isn’t a large enough time-range for them to get their act together.

This was going to leave me without the internet for about 2 weeks and as networking student (now with a networking degree) I thought I could solve this problem and I did!

One of the advantages of the house is that it is a stone’s throw away from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, the house with the internet. I quickly worked there is an option three. Steal some internet from someone else. Having discovered this I noticed that the houses are near enough to setup a wireless bridge and as I have access to my parents’ house it was very easy to reconfigure everything so I could setup two D-Link DIR-615 access points running DD-WRT to provide a wireless bridge.

An hour later I had the internet. My parents have Virgin 10mb and now so do I. So I thought to myself, do I even need my own internet connection? The answer is probably not, I have access to the 10mb via the wireless link, I get 10mb speeds, I do all my downloading at night, I’m now at work all day and the wireless doesn’t affect xbox live game play… So I got my Virgin install cancelled and now I’m saving just a little bit more because I’m stealing my parents internet and they’re OK with it.

I’d recommend it to anyone, if you’re in the position to do so… I may even write a how-to on it sometime although the information is already on Google.

Not much else to report but I figure I’d drop a line to the internet, I’ve moved the blog over to a new domain yet again, I wanted to move away from the named domain to a less formal/ professional one, no reason just did.. May not even stick.. it’ll probably hit my google rank if I have one though, probably should stop messing with it.

I suppose I should mention HASystem, my current ongoing project… Andy has gone a little crazy with this coding magic and implemented 2.0, a complete remake which is similar in some respects but 2.0 is based around plugins which seem to be working much better. It allows us to implement new features a lot better. One of which is a Shopping List which I am currently in the process of writing.

So internet, until next time…

HA or Home Automation System is a result from visiting this site and wanting a similar sort of system. For a while now I’ve considering doing something like this but never actually getting around to it mainly because of University and moving house every year.

So I started writing a program. This was about a month ago when I should have been doing my Final Year Project but lets forget about that for now. HA started out simply doing stuff I was going via RDP on my Windows Home Server which included executing various scripts to sort TV Shows and backup websites/work/svn etc.

HA is a server and client application where the server does all the work. The client is just a client and tells the server what to do. This was loosely based on two year old piece of work called MD5 Cracker, that was an assignment and was a distributed system to cracking an MD5 hash, I pretty much just copied the network code and updated it to use JSON although it wasn’t the best it worked! This is when Andrew got on board and its become a joint project between us. Andy is doing a programming degree and is probably the cleverest person I know. It has worked some magic and made everything all cool and stuff!

So here is what HA is at the moment!

HAServer

Running on the Windows Home Server HAServer is headless and currently does the following

• Runs tasks and scripts on the server
• Directly controls X10 devices via a CM11u and keeps track of states
• Wakes sleeping computers via WOL
• Some interfacing with XBMC
• Communication via HTTP and TCP using JSON.

Being a month old the system is quite limited in features but we have big plans!

HAClient

HAClient is the main client and control interface for HAServer, its got the following features

• Setup-less (It gets the HAServer IP via broadcast)
• Configures settings on HAServer
• Fully supports all features on the HAServer
• Displays XBMC information and provides audio controls
• Able to switch x10 devices on and off

HAWP7

Since getting a developer unlock for my phone I been working on my client for my HTC HD7 Windows Phone Device. It currently support X10 via the HTTP API

HAAndroid

Andy has a Nexus One and wrote a client for it..

Still pretty early days but there you go, I’ll try to keep the site updated with its progress.. In the mean time here is an awesome picture Matt took with this new camera.

Update: HASystem got featured in this months “My Automated Home” over at automatedhome.co.uk : My Automated Home: Tom Lawrence – Home Brew X10 Plus XMBC Control

So having just got a Windows Phone I’d thought I’d write a client to interface with the HA Server I have running on my WHS, so after a little coding help as I’m not a programmer but seem to be getting quite good I came up with this.. A client that allows me to turn on or off all the x10 devices I have, which isn’t many to be honest but I’ve nabbed some more of ebay! The app shows via the light bulb image what lights are currently on and once pressed the devices are turned off via HAServer on the WHS and the list of devices updated.

So, I don’t know why but I somehow came to the conclusion that I wanted a HD7 with Windows Phone 7 and I’m glad I did. The phone is awesome, after having the same standard interface on the iPhone it is refreshing being able to swipe around Windows Phone 7. Its clean and simple and doesn’t get cluttered up when you install more than 10 apps. One of my dislikes with the iPhone is that you had to manage the interface, you had to decide where apps go and within no time you have around 5 screens of apps… WP7 is much simpler giving you an alphabetical list of applications..

Coming from the 3GS it is also nice to have a bigger screen although WP7 doesn’t seem to maximise the space it has available I think it works though, gives a much cleaner, less cluttered user interface.

One major annoyance though is that BBC iPlayer isn’t supported, although I read that Flash will soon be available it’s quite annoying not being able to watch iPlayer whenever I like. You have to remember it’s pretty new compared to Android or iPhone so I suspect it will be addresses soon!

This post seems to have developed in to more of a review / how WP7 is better than iPhone and I suppose it is in my mind. Although I did like the iPhone when it first arrived after two years and the fact everyone seems to have one takes away that brand new gadget that no one else has feeling, which for a techy person like me, is pretty important to be honest… This brings me to its development support…

Unlike Android you have to pay the £65 to unlock your phone for development, even just to run your own homebrew apps you’ve got to part with £65… I was annoyed when I discovered this information and was ready to start hacking the phone to bypass it, however I remembered and learnt that Microsoft likes students and offers it free with Dream spark which is great but I’m only a student for another couple of months and after than its £65 down the drain every year, maybe I should develop an app to recover the cost? Any ideas?

It is quite annoying that you have to pay but I can see why, it’s slightly disconcerting that Android and Google provide no moderation on its app store. Being open source is great but as everyone learns from the days in high school… Not all the kids play nicely… Hearing that over 50,000 Android devices are infected with a rootkit, whispering back to hacker HQ with you information is a little scary. You shouldn’t have to worry about your phone getting a virus; you want it to just work.

Anyway, the phone is pretty awesome, the battery life opinion is yet to be decided upon but generally I’m very happy with it. The People/Contacts tile is great adding everyone you know on Facebook, Outlook and Windows live which prompts you to remove those contacts you’ve not spoken too since forever but a little contract purge is something everyone has to do sometime…

I decided I wanted to change the button functionally on my MCE remote, the remote I have is similar if not the same to the one in the picture. I never really used the coloured buttons but I want to so I thought I’d change their functions. The function being related to x10 devices which I am yet have a mess with as Royal Mail have yet to deliver them, I could rant all day about them I think I’ll move on.

My system is based upon Mythbuntu/Linux so bare that in mind and these are the steps I had to take which may differ but this should give you an idea.

1. Create a file in “~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/” called remote.xml
2. Insert the following;

<keymap>
<global>
<remote>
<red>Function_Here</red>
<green>Function_Here</green>
<yellow>Function_Here</yellow>
<blue>Function_Here</blue>>
</remote>
</global>
</keymap>

3. Replace Function_Here with an Action within XBMC, a list can be found here.
4. Save and restart XBMC.

Hope this helps, It worked for me so hopefully it’ll work else where.

I did take a couple of pictures on my iPhone of the result however.

However after playing around trying to get this fixed I gave in a took a trip to Maplin’s just down the road. I thought it would be quicker and probably not much more expensive than anywhere on the internet. Anyway I came away with an NVIDIA Geforce 210 for £30 with £10 off! Bargain!

Drove home and quickly got it installed! Surprisingly, what with this going in to a Ubuntu installation (Mythbuntu actually)  it was extremely simple. Just installed the NVIDIA proprietary and BOOM! sorted! That’s how I like it!

Anyway as I keep saying.. Good story eh?