Homeseer/HAL and Serial chip control

[bh00]

Hi,

Just wondering, if I got a copy of HAL or Homeseer, I could integrate it with some electronics I made. Via a serial port, I have a PICAXE chip. At the moment this controls 2 strings of LEDs in the skirting board of my landing. IE, I can via a small VB app, fade up and down some small white LEDs. If I could expand this so, for instance in Homeseer setup something so that if it detects motion at night, it ramps up the LEDs to 50% or something or does HAL/Homeseer not support this kind of thing.

Controlling it is simple, and just uses basic instructions I've programmed (can even be done with terminal or something).

Also, does Homeseer have voice recognition?

Thanks,
Ben

 

[electron]

Both HAL and Homeseer support Voice Recognition, and Homeseer supports plugins and scripts. Even the scripting language supports serial communications (vbs language), so shouldn't be too hard to do. I think you can do this with HAL as well, since they now allow you to create your own applications/scripts (forgot what they call it), I am still playing with this application, so I have a lot to learn. Last but not least, Girder would work as well.

 

[bh00]

ok thats good. These picaxe chips are quite good. I'm working on a new project with them now which allows me to have individually adressable 20x2 LCDs with adjustable backlight and 6 buttons per remote outstation, connected back with CAT5 to a master chip then via serial into a PC. So far I've setup 2 of the remote outstations on my desk, and they're working well, from VB I can send messages to either or both screens, or read in the button presses.

Something like that would be quite good if low-cost ones could be mounted in lightswitches to allow control of music or lights or something.

 

[smee]

I've been playing with similar distributed displays - except mine are one-way only (output from PC). I've attached a picture of one of the prototypes (they can run up to 20x4 displays). These are sitting on an RS485 network and controlled from HomeSeer through a serial port. They are used to display caller id, etc. There are some built-in "alert" LEDs (unlit in the picture) and a piezo beeper.

 

[bh00]

yeah currently I'm at the stage you're at. I'll take some pictures of what I have so far and post them tomorrow. Basically it's RS232 (via a usb->serial convertor) send over 2 pairs of the CAT5 (tx, rx, +5v and 0v). Theres a small board I soldered which takes the serial and power and puts them onto CAT5. That then splits off to the different units. They are all just spliced together, so could be daisy chained or whatever. ATM they're using the green and orange pairs. That leaves blue and brown for perhaps 1-wire temp sensing, or something.

Also, at the moment its one way, although the units talk with the computer both ways, there aren't any buttons on the remote unit.

As I say, I'll post some pics later.

 

[wa4otj]

Just wondering, if I got a copy of HAL or Homeseer, I could integrate it with some electronics I made. Via a serial port,

..
Thanks,
Ben

Ben,

Yes both applications allow control of serial devices via external plug-ins of one form or another.

The big drawback is that you will probably have to write some code yourself. You can do so in Perl, VB or even VC.

For my HAL installation, I wrote a Perl module to manage a V572 Whole-house X10 receiver, enabling/disabling device zones on command based on HAL events.

I will be shortly be posting the details with full source code on http://www.homeautomationweb.com, check it for the article in the next few days.

Cheers,
Nathan