Mark J Cox | Home automation | Open Source Software | Security | Metrics

Tablet Design Overhaul

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:13:00 GMT

The biggest problem with my home-grown Home Automation system was that I'm not a graphic designer. My displays all looked a little clunky, like they'd come out of the 1980s. Guests only ever see the user interface displayed on the tablets around the house, so I took some time over the Easter holiday to make the user interface look a bit nicer.

The user interface is written in Perl/Tk and was designed to be snappy even on the original Point 510 (100Mhz) tablets. I'd already replaced these tablets around the house with Point 1600 tablets (most picked up on ebay for about 50-100 pounds each) with the main advantage that the Point 1600 can run at 800x600 in full-colour rather than the 256 colours of the 510 in the same resolution.

I first looked around the web to see if there were any existing Perl/Tk projects that had exciting graphic design I could base on, but I didn't find anything very useful. In the end I decided to make the UI look like a web site design proposed by a colleague at Red Hat for some internal site that didn't get used.

Screenshots from the new design

Heat

The Heating interface lets you look at graphs of past readings for any sensor or change the target temperature of the house.

Light

Actually we only have a couple of X10 lights in the house, and we really only ever control the living room lights.

Weather

This is just screen-scraped from the BBC website and updated every hour.

Cams

We use this screen to look at the security cameras as well as some other Glasgow web cameras. The interface allows multipart-jpeg streaming (compatible with ZoneMinder).

Phone

This actually displays a number of events such as the status of the house alarm, capturing when the doorbell is pressed, as well as popping up details of who calls us.

Screenshots of the original design

Old heating interface for comparison. See my original software page to see how the other screens looked.

Software

I was previously using the Tk/TabBar module from Jarl to provide the nice tab bars, and a bit of hacking gave the simplified tabbar (with the advantage that the bar will still nicely wrap over two rows if needed)

The rest of it was just messing around with frames and alignment and creating the curved edges. I used the gimp to get a curve I was happy with, then coverted it from a GIF to xpm with reduced colours. The xpm was then coded into the application and simplified so that the program can generate the right curves for any font size.

The Perl/Tk I used to create the headings is available here and running that program displays the following:

1-wire Hardware

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 14:29:00 GMT

I use a Dallas 1-wire network for temperature sensing and control around the house. Ideally you run a single cable from the PC interface and attach sensors along the wire, but I didn't think of that before the house was wired. So instead I use a star network using the existing cat5 networking to each room, with a one-wire hub from AAG handling switching between the different spokes of the hub.

At the Home Automation server is a USB to 1-wire interface unit. This interface connects directly to the one-wire hub. 6 outputs from the hub go to various places around the house.

Output C6 has a ds18s20 temperature sensor plugged straight into it, this provides the temperature of the home automation cupboard.

Output C5 goes to the lounge, which has a single ds18s20 temperature sensor plugged straight into it, this provides the temperature of the lounge which is used as the master control for the heating system.

Output C2 goes to the master bedroom, again with a single ds18s20 temperature sensor.

Output C1 goes to the garage, where a temperature sensor is connected and poked out of the vent to get the outdoor temperature, and on the same wire is a 1-wire switch used to control the heating system.

The final output C4 goes to a hacked wireless doorbell. A one-wire switch detects when the doorbell is activated. The one-wire hub provides a 5v supply and so we use this to power the doorbell to save on batteries.

The home automation sensor polls each device in turn to get a reading. For short events (like a doorbell push) it monitors a latched register which shows if the state of the input has changed since the last time the device was polled. I'll write more about the software side of this and give my source code in a later article.

More photos of 1-wire:

see all at flickr.com

Displaying a moving image with Perl/Tk

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:10:00 GMT

My home automation tablets use Perl/Tk as their user interface which makes coding and prototyping really quick and easy and works on both Linux and Windows platforms. I use ZoneMinder for looking after the security cameras around the house and had set up the tablets to be able to display a static image from any camera on demand. But what I really wanted to do was to let the tablets display a streaming image from the cameras.

ZoneMinder is able to stream to browsers by making use of the Netscape server push functionality. In response to a HTTP request, ZoneMinder will send out a multipart replace header, then the current captured frame as a jpeg image, followed by a boundary string, followed by the next frame, and so on until you close the connection. It's perhaps not as efficient as streaming via mpeg or some other streaming format, but it's simple and lets you stream images to browsers without requiring plugins.

So I wrote the quick Perl/Tk program below to test streaming from ZoneMinder. It does make some horrible assumptions about the format of the response, so if you want to use this with anything other than ZoneMinder you'll need to edit it a bit. It also assumes that your network is quite good between the client and ZoneMinder; the GUI will become unresponsive if the network read blocks.

My first attempt ran out of memory after an hour -- I traced the memory leak to Tk::Photo and it seems that you have to use the undocumented 'delete' method on a Tk::Photo object otherwise you get a large memory leak. The final version below seems to work okay though.

# Test program to decode the multipart-replace stream that
# ZoneMinder sends.  It's a hack for this stream only though
# and could be easily improved.  For example we ignore the
# Content-Length.
#
# Mark J Cox, mark@awe.com, February 2006

use Tk;
use Tk::X11Font;
use Tk::JPEG;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use MIME::Base64;
use IO::Socket;

my $host = "10.0.0.180";
my $url = "/cgi-bin/zms?mode=jpeg&monitor=1&scale=50&maxfps=2";

my $stop = 0;
my $mw = MainWindow->new(title=>"test"); 
my $photo = $mw->Label()->pack();
$mw->Button(-text=>"Start",-command => sub { getdata(); })->pack();
$mw->Button(-text=>"Stop",-command => sub { $stop=1; })->pack();
MainLoop;

sub getdata {
    return unless ($stop == 0);
    my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>$host,Proto=>'tcp',PeerPort=>80,)
;
    return unless defined $sock;
    $sock->autoflush(1);
    print $sock "GET $url HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: $host\r\n\r\n";
    my $status = <$sock>;
    die unless ($status =~ m|HTTP/\S+\s+200|);

    my ($grab,$jpeg,$data,$image,$thisbuf,$lastimage);
    while (my $nread = sysread($sock, $thisbuf, 4096)) {
        $grab .= $thisbuf;
        if ( $grab =~ s/(.*?)\n--ZoneMinderFrame\r\n//s ) {

            $jpeg .= $1;
            $jpeg =~ s/--ZoneMinderFrame\r\n//; # Heh, what a
            $jpeg =~ s/Content-Length: \d+\r\n//; # Nasty little
            $jpeg =~ s/Content-Type: \S+\r\n\r\n//; # Hack

            $data = encode_base64($jpeg);
            undef $jpeg;
            eval {
                $image = $mw->Photo(-format=>"jpeg",-data=>$data);
            };
            undef $data;
            eval {
                $photo->configure(-image=>$image);
            };
            $lastimage->delete if ($lastimage); #essential as Photo leaks!
            $lastimage = $image;
        }
        $jpeg .= $1 if ($grab =~ s/(.*)(?=\n)//s);
        last if $stop;
        $mw->update;
    }
    $stop = 0;
}

Russell Handorf used threads to support more than one camera at a time (although I would probably do this in a loop or with select instead of threads)

Controlling a Plasma Screen via the Internet

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:00:00 GMT

Earlier this year I finally got around to buying a replacement TV, and settled on a Hitachi PD7200 plasma. First thing I noticed was a port on the back labelled 'service use only' which sounded like a fun challenge.

Turns out that on the Hitachi PD7200 plasma this is a serial port that is enabled by default, so you just need to know the right protocol and you can talk to the plasma. I don't have a PC close to the plasma, but last year I did buy some Lantronix MSS100 devices which have a 10/100 ethernet connection at one end, and a serial RS232 port at the other. I was't quite sure what I'd use them for, but for under 50 pounds each they seemed like a bargain at the time.

Hitachi technical support replied to my query within hours and sent me a couple of PDF documents outlining the protocol, so this was going to be much easier than guesswork.

Knowing the filename, google found this online version, Hitachi control protocol, pdf

A small amount of perl later, and I had script that could query the TV to find out various things (settings, channel, and interestingly the number of hours the TV has been on since it started life). The script can also get the TV to do various things like turn itself on and off and select channels.

Hitachi Plasma control (perl, 2k)

So now I have to think of a use for this. I guess I could get the TV to change channels when some event occurs (like one of the motion sensors triggering) or perhaps daily grab the TV panel lifetime to see how many hours of TV we watch a day (and perhaps what channels). Perhaps I could automatically dim the lights and select cinema mode if the channel is changed to DVD (although I could do that just using a programmable remote). I'm sure I'll think of a use for this eventually, but it was a fun diversion for a cold and wet Scottish weekend.

Live outdoor temperature (updated every few minutes, hit reload)

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:49:00 GMT

Intelliswitch Wall Dimmers

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT

We didn't think much about lighting when our house was being built, so it ended up being fitted out by the builder just like every other new home with standard white plate light switches. The lights themselves however were all the recessed R50 spotlight types. We went through a variety of different ideas for lighting control before settling on using "Intelliswitch" switches for the majority of the house.

When thinking about home automation most people assume that this includes having all your lighting under direct control of some computer system. You can then control everything from a central point, do cunning scene lighting, and magically turn on and off lights during the day. Since our house was already wired up and we didn't fancy rewiring to install any of the number of lighting solutions available this left us with a difficult problem.

X10 lighting

X10 devices are commonly used to control things like lighting and lamps because they don't require any rewriting. You can simply use plug adaptors or light switch replacements and the devices communicate over the power lines. So our first experiment was using X10 for lighting control.

LW10 UK light switch

The switch most commonly used for this is the LW10 which can turn lights on and off, dim them, and be controlled by the X10 protocol from other things. We didn't much like the look of the LW10; it's chunky, sticks out of the wall, and according to folks on various X10 forums constantly blows fuses. Perhaps the biggest problem with the LW10 is that you can't remotely tell it to go to a discrete dim level. You can't say "Dim to 50% brightness", only "Dim by X steps". Since we wanted to do scene lighting this was far from ideal. Also in the UK these things are quite expensive; you don't get much change out of UKP30 per unit.

On the continent the X10 light switches are much better, having the ability to dim to a discrete level and looking a lot more classy. They do need to have a neutral wire at each switch socket to function though, which is not common in the UK. Fortunately when our house was built the electricial wired a neutral to every socket. We think this was to save having to use connectors inside the ceiling as spotlights were being used, but we'll probably never know for sure. Anyway this was good news for us:

LW11 German light switch

So we bought one from Laser and put it in the living room, controlling 10 25W R50 spotlight bulbs. We can't fault the function of this switch, it works reliably and we can set the level remotely, or using a remote control with a IR X10 receiver in the same room. However these things are designed to be fitted to continental backboxes and it never really looked in place. See a picture of the lw11 in the living room. We couldn't put the right switch rocker in because the switch is slightly twisted and it just constantly catches on the edges stopping it from working reliably. Also these switches are a bit more expensive than the UK LW10.

Just dim it

Another problem we had in the house was over-voltage which dramatically cut the life of the expensive spotlight bulbs. Actually the only place where the life of the bulbs was not affected was in the en-suite bathrooms which we had fitted with touch switches we'd bought from somewhere like Argos. These touch switches were white, had a LED in the centre, and allowed you to turn lights on and off (and critically for the ensuite allowed the lights to turn themselves off after some number of minutes). These switches also had a soft start which we figured was mostly responsible for the increased lamp life.

Touch switches in the ensuites

So we decided that dimmers were the solution for rooms where we didn't need automatic control of lighting. The big blocky white switches from Argos were not really approriate for the look of the house. We looked around and found some amazingly nice looking dimmers that also were able to be controlled by infrared. We bought a few of these from TLC and installed them in the kitchen and bedrooms.

Cute IR touchswitches

Unfortunately it wasn't long before the first switch stopped working with a burning smell from inside it. A month or so later the second switch stopped working in an identical way. We gave up and sent the switches back, perhaps they didn't like the high voltage in the house, they certainly were not overloaded.

So by now we'd figured out that we didn't really need to be able to control every light in the house and in fact just the main living room lights made sense to control and dim for watching movies and so on. We also figured out that we really needed to use dimmers with a soft-start function to help prolong the life of the bulbs.

Back to where we started

I don't know how we found it, but the touch switches we had installed in the ensuite bathrooms were made by a company called "Touch'n'glo" in the UK. Hunting around google we found a web site for them, selling a range of "Intelliswitch" dimmers. The basic dimmer allowed you to touch the light switch to turn the light on and off and hold it down to dim. They were available in some lovely brushed metal finishes, had switchable colour covers to blend into the decor of the rooms, were not too expensive, and just looked perfect.

We chatted to their sales director and found out that the switches were designed and built in the UK and that they would soon also be available with slaves (for two or three way lighting like on our landings) and as multiple gang switches where you want to control more than one light from the same place. Perfect! We promised to write up a review of the switches and ordered about 10 of them with a slimline brushed stainless steel plate.

Brushed slimline stainless steel dimmers

Mini review: Intelliswitch dimmers

The web site does a good job of explaining how these work and it's really as simple as it looks - replacing all ten of the light switches took only an hour or two and it took us longer to decide what colour inserts to use in each switch I think. The only difficulty during installation is making sure that you have the load and supply leads correct - the way our switches had been installed it was impossible to tell from inspection and we had to rely on a voltage meter (and careful fingers!).

We've been using them now for around nine months without a single incident, including dimming of some mains halogen GU10 fittings. The switches just work, look great, and visitors always admire them. Some of the switches have a slight humming noise when they are on which you can hear when very close to the switches, but that is something you'd find with any dimmer working in the same way.

So what are the downsides? to me the only real downside is that they're not computer or even infrared controllable. The geek in me wants to be able to control them remotely. If these things were X10 compatible those horrible white expensive X10 switches would be left on the shelves forever. You can now get RF switches that don't require rewiring that give you computer control, but they can cost five to ten times the price, per switch, so it's not very economical. These intelliswitches are around the same price as you'd buy a standard metal wall switch from some large DIY chain.

Okay, there is one more downside that I wasn't expecting. I was waiting for the Intelliswitch folks to release their 2-gang and slave versions of the switch so I could finish converting all the switches in the house. At the moment you walk in and see a hallway with two nice brushed stainless steel switches, and one horrible white place hall light switch. About half the switches in the house need the 2-gang or slave versions. Originally I was expecting these to be available in Spring 2004, but we're not into October and they are not available. Intelliswitch didn't reply to my mails, or phone calls with expected dates, and their web site has been broken now for a number of months. Companies house still shows Touch'n'glo as as existing. I do hope the company underneath is okay, these switches simply rock.

Intelliswitch in the office

Custom software using Jabber/XMPP

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Protocol: Jabber

I toyed with several ways of dealing with the home automation system. Misterhouse looked very impressive and was written in Perl so easy to extend, but it also liked to take control directly itself of any hardware. I wanted each bit of home automation hardware to have its own intelligence, it's own bot, allowing the hardware to exist on separate machines and architectures. So I started out writing bits of custom perl for each of the bits of hardware (with some C for things like serial interfacing which was hard for me to get to work perfectly with Perl). I then heard about the XAP project which looked quite interesting but seemed to have a number of weaknesses - it mostly relied on udp broadcast packets for the components to talk together (I wanted components on different network segments, some on wireless, some on links I share with video traffic - udp broadcast packets just are not reliable enough), the other problem was that the components already written were under a license that prohibited commercial use at all. Not that I intend to sell this, but if I'm going to work on software I want that sofware under a BSD-style license or failing that GPL. So my requirements were to have a lightweight messaging system ideally using XML that could run over a security layer (for the wireless network) that I could extend and easily write a custom client for. The answer of course was Jabber. With the Net::Jabber module I can easily write bots and clients in Perl for speed, and with the Perl Tk interface writing user interfaces takes no time at all and they work across platform: Linux or even Windows.

The nice thing about Jabber is that clients for Jabber exist for just about every platform. It's simply to take the source code for a Jabber client and add some buttons and things to make it control any aspect of the home automation system. And if no source exists you can simply chat to the lighting bot and tell it "lights living 18". The plan is to be able to control this all from a wireless PDA too.

Controller: Fujitsu Point

The big test; would Perl and Tk and a Net::Jabber client run okay on a AMD 100MHz processor running in 800x600 256 colour mode? The startup time is about a minute, but then once it's done it happily refreshes the screen with no real visible delays and sends and receives (and parses) messages without a hitch. Here are some pics from the initial interface written over Christmas vacation 2002.

Figure 1: Lighting interface (a Jabber x10 bot)

Figure 2: TiVo interface (a Jabber TiVo bot communicating with a custom tivoweb module that returns XML status information)

Figure 3: Heating interface (a Jabber to one-wire bot that talks to the one-wire temperature sensors, logs data using rrdtool, and talks to the one-wire heating switch)

Figure 4: Misc stuff interface (the DSL bot talking to the cable modem and the UPS bot talking to the UPS device. Alerts also come in here)

Figure 5: Caller ID interface (a Meteor caller id bot with pop-up pics for most of the people we know)

Figure 6: Interface to front door camera (rear only goes into the MV1000 so far)

Each hardware component has it's own bot that can be queried for status and can also be made to broadcast status information either when something changes or every minute. The client simply parses every message it receives and displays it in the right place. Software will be here soon.

Mounting a Fujisu Point tablet on the wall

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

I wanted to be able to mount the Fujitsu Point 510 on the wall. I looked for the official cradle but many months went by without one appearing on ebay. A couple of sites show how they mounted their Fujitsu Point into the wall, but I wanted to be able to lift it off and use it as a tablet from time to time too.

Inspiration hit when looking at the back of the Fujitsu and finding a large number of circular sticky covers - covering really nice screw points. So a couple of drywall fixings into the wall and custom brackets later and here is the result. The custom brackets were made from spare PC expansion card slot covers, nice and thin but quite strong)

Brief Overview

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 00:00:00 GMT

Infrastructure

3 CAT5 cables to most rooms in the house. Fortunately the builder ran some extra cables through the house for me before it was too late and the final fix happened. I found some cunning 3-outlet sockets from BKA which look good and blend into a domestic environment.
Wireless network (802.11g) that reaches through most of the house, but on an untrusted part of the internal network. This generally gets used by web tablets as the coverage isn't great.
Satellite-grade coax to most rooms. This allows the cable modem and cable tv box to all be in separate rooms and away from their entry point. Some of the internal cameras use these connections.
UPS for all the important bits, highly necessary since the house voltage is regularly over 250 volts and a little tempremental sometimes.

Network

Various networking stuff: transparent firewall, second firewall+NAT, one of those D-Link multi-protocol print servers serving a laser and inkjet
Home automation server. In early 2005 my old 400MHz PC finally gave up. It was running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (it was running Red Hat Linux even before I started working for Red Hat). Machine was replaced with a dual-AMD machine. This machine runs the Jabber server and the various HA bots.
A central 19" patch panel for the CAT5, coax, and 10/100 16 port switch (bought from ebay). See photo (Mar 2002). 19" Wall bracket from Minitran
Cable internet and TV from Telewest. The Telewest termination point is in the garage, see photo (Feb 2002). The cable goes to the central patch panel where it's split to the cable modem and runs back to the living room where the decoder lives at the moment.

Lighting

How we chose our lighting switches and settled on the Intelliswitch.
A german LW11G X10 dimmer switch controlling 10 25W recessed lights in the main room, the switch *just* fits in the drywall backbox. I spent many hours working out where to put the computer control unit, a CM12U, so that it managed to send signals to reach all the rooms in the house - nearly everywhere I put it there was a blackspot where things wouldn't work. Anyway having the CAT5 meant it doesn't matter where the CM12U is as the CAT5 provides a serial link back to node0. An AD10 and LW10 finish off the X10 stuff, controlling two sets of Christmas lights right now. X10 stuff from Laser

Heating

Control of the central heating system (it had a 240v switched input which we control with a relay from a 1-wire switch.
A set of one-wire temperature sensors from Maxim together with a 1-wire usb interface to allow logging of temperature from around the house. We recently added a 1-wire hub so we could use a star network of more than a couple of sensors. Anyway the raw data goes into rrdtool and the output graphs get uploaded via DAV here.

TiVo with a Turbonet ethernet board from 9th Tee - allowing remote control from any machine in the house

The rest

Control of a plasma screen
Five Fujitsu Point 1600 webpads mounted on the wall to control everything.
Meteor Caller ID unit that logs incoming and outgoing calls. This is hooked to a Linux box with a bit of C software to decode the strange format
Caller ID displayed on the TiVo by using the jabber system
Alarm system. The communicator outputs are also wired to a Linux box which triggers various events based on the state of the alarm
SMS alerts. The main linux box is hooked to a dedicated mobile phone used to send alerts from the UPS, alarm etc. (and allow remote control of various things). Since phone cables here are above ground they're too easy to cut!

Plans (as time and money permits)

Control the external lighting and curtains (I installed pull-cord curtains already to make this easier)
Work out a system for distributed TV. At the moment the TiVo's RF output feeds up to a distribution amplified in the loft, need to work out how to watch DVD's (RGB out only) and work on an IR distribution system (currently a single 'One For All' remote extender)
Maybe move the TiVo and cable box to the node0 and send the signal up to the lounge over CAT5