glh33 – Home automation & xPL

Wanted to give greatings to all those that follow this blog, and thanks for your participation in the xPL community. I sense a growing interest in the xPL project at the time and would really like to see 2012 as a major year for our open home automation protocol.
As a way to try to link all those emerging (or well established) project, I created an xPL webring. For those who wish to participate, just leave a comment or send an email, I will send you neaded informations to include your blog/website in the ring.

Happy new 2012 year.

This xpl client connects to a Mysql database.
It handles :

• History log of all seen xPL messages
• Look up and requests on the database using the db.basic schema

Configuration items:

•      hostname : localhost or ip of the server hosting the Mysql database
•      username : username to connect on Mysql (eg root)
•      password : password associated to the username
•      database : name of the schema or database to be used (‘xpl’ by default)
•      logging  : ‘y’ if you want to log all messages in the database.

When the app is configured, it tries to connect to the database (note that libmysql.dll must be in system path).
Once done, it tries to open the database schema (eg xpl). If it doesn’t exist, it is created automatically.
When logging is required, two tables will be created : log_body and log_header.

You can also query the database by using db.basic messages.

One of the thing I find harder into setting home automation mechanisms is real-time. As an old developper, I have to face experience I never faced before.
You set up a configuration (for xPL, it is based on determinators and globals) and you just can’t test it extensively because most part of the conditions are related to …. TME.
I found an usefull way to circumvent this (be aware, you may become mad) : translate every OSD.BASIC and LOG message into Google Talk messages (using the xpl-jabber module that rocks).

* The ‘Clear’ button now also reset the left panel treeview
* Introduced a simplified treeview for network elements discovered ( V-D-I instead of V\D\I )
* Main window layout saved between sessions
* Reintroduced filtering capabilities. New schema filters can be added directly from schema tree (right clic on the schema)

Preparing another step in my home automation toolkit, I work on a port to Lazarus of a complete Statemachine. I found a very interesting project here. Thanks to Melander for this great job. Don’t know right now how I’ll use it but I’ve got some ideas.