Author Topic: European hardware  (Read 6097 times)

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European hardware
« on: April 07, 2005, 02:56:49 am »
Hi.

Although i'm posting this even before i tryed the plutohome software, i think that this is a GREAT software.  Apparently, it's not that hard to put all together and fully working.
I'm going to try and install the pluto in Gentoo.

I'm not sure if you can post it, but i would like to know what hardare would you use to make a full automated home (brands and models).
I'm asking this because i live in europe (Portugal, to be precise), and i need to find the equivalent hardware available in europe ( the more used hardware is X10, and i did not like the result. I do not want X10 in my "future automated house").

So, what hardaware would you recommend ?

Thanks..

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European hardware
« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2005, 08:43:02 am »
Good luck with Gentoo.  We haven't tried it, though, and although the main C++ programs should work, some of the scripts to automate tasks, like configuring the firewall, may not, if they do things specific to Debian.

As far as hardware.  First you will want a gc100 by globalcache wherever you have a TV--this does the Infrared Emitting to control the A/V Equipment.  They are sold in Europe, around Euro 150.  You'll need a Symbian Series 60 mobile phone with Bluetooth if you want the mobile phone remote (see www.series60.com).  The touchscreen tablets we show on the website are DT375 and DT368 made by dtresearch (dtresearch.com).

As far as controlling your lights...  X10 isn't very reliable.  You can improve it with boosters and repeaters, though.  There are many alternatives, but be prepared, they are all a lot more expensive.  Lutron and Vantage make high end systems.  But budget around Euro 400 per light switch.  In Europe, you also have EIB.  We have drivers for EIB and it costs less.  However, EIB is very complicated to setup--you'll need a dealer to do it.

There are also other PLC devices (PLC=powerline carrier, like X10).  Like X10 they should be less expensive and easy to setup--they don't need their own wires like EIB, Vantage and Lutron.  PLC means they send signals over the existing electrical wires.  The newer ones claim to be much more reliable than X10.  However, no one standard has really risen to the top and X10 remains the only universal PLC.  We don't have drivers for these newer PLC systems, but we will write one for you or with you.  If you find one of these new PLC systems, and it has RS232 or some other PC controllable interface, Pluto includes a 'remote access' feature.  If you activate it, it creates a secure ssh tunnel back to our developers who can then test the drivers and be sure it's working.  It will take a bit of digging to find the best non-X10 PLC system, or a bit of cash to go with the higher end systems.

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Re: European hardware
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2005, 10:41:51 am »
Quote from: "favinha"
Hi.

Although i'm posting this even before i tryed the plutohome software, i think that this is a GREAT software.  Apparently, it's not that hard to put all together and fully working.
I'm going to try and install the pluto in Gentoo.



Hi Favinha,

     Have you been able to install the pluto in Gentoo?  If so, what major complications did you need to overcome?


Yours Truly,

Camisa

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Gentoo
« Reply #3 on: October 06, 2005, 05:30:15 pm »
I've tried to develop an instalation script fot Gentoo, but my job takes all the time i have, so i kinda put that on hold.
 I really wanted to finish that, but it's more complicated that it seems. If you're going to install Pluto on a Gentoo machine, write down the procedure  :D , and then  share it with us here.
 If you need help for anything, ask.

Good luck.

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Build from source
« Reply #4 on: October 06, 2005, 06:41:48 pm »
Hi Favinha,

     I hope I can find the time to work on it.  I would like to have a Gentoo ebuild put together by Christmas.  There's an IRC chatroom setup now on Freenode, #pluto  which I will monitor for others building from source on Gentoo.

     Apparently, this cvs is going to require a bit of real work to be done or else this project will remain debian only for another whole year.  I know factually there are some incompatible scripts which are debian specific for the firewall...  what else stands out as a glaring fixme?

     ---by the way, I'm sure a README and an INSTALL would be the first two contributions I can make to the sources.  How much work has been checked in since you last worked on this? Also, can you offer any guidance for a starting point?


Yours Truly,


Camisa

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European hardware
« Reply #5 on: October 07, 2005, 09:39:37 am »
We'll try to give you all the information we can.  We know there's not a standard README or INSTALL for those building from source, and all our compilations are done using our own c++ program, MakeRelease.

The reason is that Pluto includes soooo many different pieces, all of which have very specific requirements.  For example, our UpdateMedia program, which monitors the media partitions to pick up new files the user may add over the samba share and scan for attributes to add to the media database, requires INotify in the kernel.  And then there are the 3rd party applications.  VDR, for example, requires certain kernel options.  Others like Linphone requries a certain version of the Asterisk library.  We found that only certain versions of bluez Bluetooth libraries can handle constant scanning like we do.  And in some cases, we had to put extra patches to the 3rd party projects that perhaps the main project didn't want to include because they were specific to Pluto interoperability.  For example I know we build our own Asterisk.

Originally the reason we wrote MakeRelease rather than using the normal mechanisms was because we wanted to target all distros, and different distros use different packaging versions, and both Linux and Windows.  So MakeRelease is database-driven, and you can say that 'Bluetooth Dongle' when compiled under Windows requires Widcom SDK version X or Y, when compiled under Debian requires bluez and bluez-utils, and under Suse requires bluetooth-subsys.

But in the end we found it was sooooo much work just getting it all to run on 1 platform, we abandoned the others for the moment.  We figure once we have a release version that we know is not going to change, then we can make it work for other distros.  But for now it would slow us down too much.  When we upgraded our kernel and debian mirror recently it broken dozens and dozens of packages, and took us weeks to get it all working.  The latest debian sarge introduced bugs in lots of packages, for example, their update-inetd had a typo preventing it from upgrading non-interactively, which broken several packages.  And Bluetooth was broken in kernel 2.6.12.2-2.6.13.rc6, and so on and so on.  If we tried to repeat that whole testing process for lots of platforms, we would have never gotten the release out.

If you want to build from source, check out our whole svn tree.  Then you'll have to build a few things by hand to get the basic Pluto libraries that most of our stuff relies on:

src/DCE src/PlutoUtils src/SerializeClass src/pluto_main

Then you could build src/MakeRelease.  I use the following script to do an automated build on my own pc each night:

svn co http://svn.plutohome.com/pluto/trunk .
/usr/pluto/bin/MakeRelease -d -c -a -o 1 -r 2,9,11 -m 1 -s /home/work -n / > /home/work/MakeRelease.log

That builds everything.  However MakeRelease requires you to have the pluto_main databaes and mysql running, since that's where the dependency information is stored.  You can add a -h ip_address if the mysql server is other than localhost.  But MakeRelease doesn't automatically add the required dependencies first--it only builds.  The -r 2,9,11 means build for a '2=debian package', '9=.tar files with binaries', '11=debian package with source'.  To get the dependencies there's another program ConfirmDependencies.  This is run automatically at startup.  It checks to see if the machine is for building from source (ie the development flag is set in the database), or just for running.  If for building from source, it pulls in extra packages (like source headers and development libraries and so forth).

Hope this helps a bit.