Getting more advanced on my setup

So over the years, my house got c-bus installed as a result of a major renovation...

It included a B&W Mk11 screen with logic downstairs, and one upstairs without logic. There is a PAC that has never been used, a USB CNI that hardly ever gets used... and in more recent times a Wiser was added.

As my requirements grow, I seem to have out grown the initial setup... Now I want more TCP / HTML things... ie. Finally got my blinds to automate, and I am scrapping the top temperature for the day to determine if the blinds should be up in the morning or not...

Its all good fun - but finally getting the smarts in my home automation.

The Wiser for me is OK - but have always been disappointed in how little control or customisation I can do in the screen layout.. But at least it gave me a view to TCP connections...

So the wiser scrapes the BOM Forecast high for the day in the calculation - but I would love to see that on my screen. Being a B&W thing without tcpip - the best I have been able to do is place the temp in a value of a dimmer not being used. Wiser sets it, B&W Screen can read it and display.

But it would be nice to get some text on the screen - 30 characters - things like Rain Developing or Cloudy... Which is in the source I am scraping.

I suppose the User System IO variables would have been nicked to shared across devices on cubs - but I can't find anywhere I can trick something to pass text from my Wiser to the screen in the kitchen.

So the drastic thought has occurred - is it time for me to upgrade to home gate - and get rid of the wiser. Have all my logic on home gate, and control what I want - including some more advanced features...

Do I trade my Wiser in for a PC, Touch Screen and Home gate ? Thoughts guys - am I going to have a trade off with something else ?

At first I thought a small PC, and a touch screen - but then the thought moved to something like a Microsoft Surface tablet - All in one - has a USB port, I can get a hub - one for the dongle, and the other for the network...

I think this would be better for me... Just making sure as I keep getting disappointed each time I introduce something to my home and subsequently find limitations...

Guessing a remote desktop into that machine would also give me remote access like a wiser...

Convince me, or if you have a cheap dongle your not using... let me know - lol ! Just downloaded the software to play and see if it works for my ideas

 

Good to see you are doing some cool things with your setup.

On the issue of sending text between devices, it is possible! I do it all the time where I scrape weather forecasts and precis and send the data to other touchscreens and devices. Numbers can easily be sent by using the measurement application (so your ext max, min etc for the next few days can be pushed to other devices... even the eDLT!).

To push text around the bus, use the Multi-Room Audio (MRA) application.

Hope this helps a little. I don't do too much these days... way too busy. The last cool thing I did was to write some code in the CTC3 to push energy consumption and generation from my solar panels to pvoutput.org This has been incredibly useful in understanding how I use my energy and how my solar panels are performing

Cheers

 

Am keen to know how you scrape the forecast off of BOM easily? Are you accessing the XML file? I'd appreciate some insight as to what file you drag in off of BOM and how you parse the output?

BenC

 

I believe that you now need to look outside of Clipsal for a solution. There are many products out there that will give you much more integration of un-like systems.

As an example, my HVAC\lights\theatre amp\alarm\phone\media centre are all integrated so that when I use the theatre everything happens that needs to happen. These are separate systems that C-bus would struggle to work with on its own. It also means I am not limited to Clipsal products only.

Homegate is not cheap and there are options that are cheaper with more integration options.

Good luck - it is very addictive.
(I just purchased another PLC and VSD for my automated home)

 

Hi Ben

I'll post the code in the next day or so for this. TBH, I can't remember how I did it... was many years ago, but it still works fine and I get the weather info on my screen(s).

Cheers

 

Would really appreciate it Conformist .. !

Would really love to use this in multiple scenarios including irrigation controls with a wiser only setup and passive cooling controls (motorised windows/blinds). I've finished some basic code for the latter using real external/internal readings from sensors but need the forecast data to round it out.

I have spent a good half day either using the wrong source with too many spaces, the wrong approach to scrape the data in logic, or the wrong target (real/string) to store it resulting in failed results. Having a source with specific unique tags/location is easy but it seems I need to use a more fuzzy logic approach to drag out of less structured output from BOM.

I've been playing with both XML (too much data) and TXT files (too many blanks/unpredictable, is there a way to drop 'spaces' using pos logic?) with no success .. and need to seek some smarter coders to finish the puzzle.

Regards,


BenC