Yes, Road Runner is ABSOLUTELY FREE and actually I have seen a bit of talk on the HA ideas in their forums. BSR, You asked for it.... so here comes one LENGTHY post! See, I have also given some serious though into this, thus, why I come across as a bit overzealous with this post
I just want to completely finish the CarPC and custom skin before tackling another project. This has also been a great way to learn how everything works, to use later when doing the HA stuff.
Road Runner is a PRIME caidate for HA control. It has all if not more features that I have seen in many HA touchscreen apps. Show me another HA front end, designed for touchscreens that can embed an application, video clip, Television, or anything else for that matter in any size, combination and anywhere on the screen.
The main features include:
- FULL WYSIWYG Editor for creating the skins.
Basically draw anything you want in any paint program of your choice, load that in the editor, and add the defined area with the editor by dragging a box around the area you want to be a button, lable, indicator ect ect
- Able to launch external programs and pass variables to them, as well as send info back to Road Runner
- Road runner can create variables, global variables, and save info to an ini file for later recall
- Place lables anywhere you want (Like Artist, Album, Date, Tracktime and hundreds of others)
- Full Media support such as MP3, DVD, Video(Anything you can play on the PC it can handle through the interface), TV tuners, Satellite Radio, AM/FM Radio ect
- "Indicators" to determine the status of a device (Phone connected, Mute indicator, Sat Radio strength ect)
- Cell Phone integration with PHOCO and Bluetooth (With FULL features such as placing & receiving calls, Pop-Up displays incomming caller number, name and optionally a photo, displaying signal strength, messages waiting, full SMS sending receiving ect ect..)
- Can embed flash/swf applications and effects
- many effect when switching screens such as fading/wiping ect
- Embeded web browser
- Supports virtually unlimited resolutions... (1920 x 1080 is NO problem) and is 100% scalable by defining what resolution you want it to display as in the ini
- Built in Photo viewer
- Built in Weather capabilities
- Built in CD-Ripper with CDDB support and tagging of files
- buttons can have different functions when pressed once, twice, 3 times, held ect
- Logic capabilities (Relating to HA for instance, if light is on when button is pressed, then do this, if not do that)
- Voice recognition plugins available
- Screen gesture's (I have mine when I touch the screen and drag dirrectly to the right, it goes to the next song for instance. Can get much more complicated, such as drawing an "M" with your finger on the screen, to jump to the media skin ect)
- Built in Text To speech using the systems default voice (Can be set to read anything, or to say something when a button is pressed. For instance, touch the weather button and it says "Displaying Current weather information")
- Touch screen sliders for video playback, volume control ect
OHhhhh!! Did I mention that Road Runner supports Girder commands directly
I am sure I probably missed about a hundred things here, but it certainly gives you an idea of the major power this free app has under the hood!
Another great plus, is the author, Guino, is VERY active in the forums, and LISTENS to what people want, and does updated 1-2 times a month, PLUS it is OPEN SOURCE, so many times people add stuff, and it gets included in the official releases.
One of the great parts is there are no "individual" buttons and graphics. It works with 3 screen sized graphics. One for the OFF, ON and DOWN states. This lets you design a custom screen with NO restraints of button sizes, locations, overlaping, allignment ect normally associated with using individual graphic "components" to design a screen.
The 3 screens are pretty simple:
Off is the standard screen, Down(Like a rollover when a button is clicked/pressed), and on that show's and indicator such as mute status.
On top of that are the indicators. Indicators are placed on the ON skin, and then masked. So when the OFF skin is showing, and an indicator is then ON it "unmasks" that area to show the area of the ON skin. Hope this makes sence.
The other FANTASTIC part, as far as HA is concerned, is multiple monitor support. So you could have a 7" touchscreen to browse video's ect, and send them to another monitor TV ect.
The only major drawback, would be customized scheduling, if/then/else ect. BUT with a backend like Home Seer, commands could easily be sent back and forth through Girder or dirrectly in many cases.
If anyone is interested, just download Road Runner and give it a try. It's free, and comes with a basic skin to control media, launch aplications and many other built in features. They have a fantastic support forum that rivals this one, and Home Seers.
The Forum can be
Found Here, and the Road Runner and MANY MANY skins can be
FOUND HERE.
