As a few of you know, I have moved for the past few months from Home Automation to CarPC mode as a hobby
Now that I have just about everything in order, and working the way with Road Runner and
My DigitalFX skin, (Have a look at that link for some screen shots of the interface) Its time to go back to Home Automation for a while.
Here is a quick video of just a couple of the features
During the past couple months I was toying as using Road Runner as a front end for my In-wall touchscreen. I had limited success using all sorts of scripts and ways to talk to HS over the network.
The last link was getting Road Runner and Home Seer to communicate directly with each other. I just over came that in the past couple days
I have written a plugin for Road Runner, that allows full communication between HS & RR. It makes all of the commands completely native to Road Runner. It works if RR and HS are on the same machine, or works across a network as well. You can control devices, get device status, trigger events, receive event triggers from HS and so forth. So you can put a motion sensor by the front door, and when it detects motion, send a command to Road Runner to display your camera screen.
What makes Road Runner so great, is that it is VERY easy to create skins for.
Making a skin is as simple as drawing up a screen in your favorite paint program, and then opening it in the GUI skin editor, and putting any text, labels, buttons, application embedding areas, and such in place. Thats as simple as I think you can get
Here is the image alone that I did in Photoshop for the living room lights: (The indicidual icons are embedded in my PSD, or you can have RR load an image into that area if you don't want to put them in the main image.)
Here it is in the skin editor (The house code M3 is all that would need to be changed to control a different device. Pressing the Dim Bar to the right, creates a small pop-up screen with a dim slider that you can move with your finger to the desired level, or tap the dim / bright buttons at the top or bottom of the slider to go 5% increments.)
And the final GUI that will be displayed on the touchscreen. Notice the above images have different background colors, it is actually transparent, and you can choose what background image or color to show behind the screens, in this case I used a black image with some colorful swirls on it)
As far as the font colors, and the buttons at the bottom, you can change them from within RR the skin, or define what color you want in the skin editor.
The next is it can actually do far more than just about any Home Automation GUI on the market! It does it all... Extensive Weather information, maps, interactive maps , gas prices, Youtube videos, scribble pad, Calculator, Monitoring Camera's, Google Earth, Photo viewer with pan and zoom, AM/FM/HD radio, XM or Sirius satellite, Local theater listings, and about 1,000 other things
All from a screen that is 100% designed for touchscreen use.
As far as audio, it has the most powerful music database capabilities that I have ever seen to manage your music library. You can list by genre, year, artist, album, song name and can sort by any of them as well, randomize, sort by year...... The search is extremely powerful as well, such as <1980 to get all music in your collection from 1979 and earlier. The music is stored on the local machine, and can point to any computer on the network for the actual music files. It has a built in virtual 10 disk changer that you can add music to any disk with a couple clicks. As an example, you can search for "Aerosmith" and the results show instantly (database driven). You can then click "Results to disk" and choose a disk number to put it on. Every single Aerosmith song you have in your collection no matter if it's on a full album, random music folder or compilation albums is then on that disk.
Being it is database driven, and does not rely on filder structure (Uses MP3 tags), you could literally put every single MP3 you have in a single folder, and still view my album, artist, genre ect.
Lastly, there is a LOT of hardware that is supported by RR. You can hook up XM, Sirius, HD radios, camera's, and such. There are game port plugins that you can rip appart a USB joypad type device to get 16 physical buttons that can do anything when pressed. There are also specific devices, such as the Fusion Brain, that will give you Digital and Analog in's and outs. This could be used to control relay's for whole house audio and the likes.
RR is also as easy to write scripts for as Home Seer. You can parse web pages to get information ect....
So, the question is, would anyone be interested in such a plugin? I have coded it for personal use, and a lot is hard coded. I could make an ini with settings for network machine names and such.
