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No need at all to thank me, I am just a grateful user.  I have been using LMCE in some form or another for 3 years now and I enjoy doing my part to make it even better.  With enough effort I will eventually help write code but until that time I do what I know, which is piecing things together until they POST, then dumping the results on your lap. 

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89580 Posts in 12106 Topics by 18821 Members. Latest Member:

Imagine if 18,821 people gave hardware and setup feedback from their unique systems!  For me to find unsupported junk I would have to dig out a IIgs or C128 cassette drive.

I don't know it's level of functionality but I see a data logger plugin available on the web admin page.  With the right interface it seems like a query could be done for recent commands and a current status inferred.  This would work for everything except manual changes to a state as I doubt a device would bother to communicate that back to a controller. 

A light level sensor inside the lamp shade could query state as could an energy usage module in a sense.  The level of automation as stated very early in this topic is as advanced as the pile of coin you throw at it.  To do it without adding more modules you have to think about things in terms of 'what do I want to happen' not 'how do I want to make this thing happen.'

With the exception of the morning following a great night out at bars... When I go into my bathroom I want a light on. Add a sensor and the act of walking in gives me the desired outcome.

"If it is on already, send it an off command. If it's off, leave it off."  That four part statement can be simplified to, "I want the light off.". Send an off command to device x, mission accomplished. 

To make things quasi-automated or more user friendly than not automated at all there is an orbiter to allow control over devices.  If hunting for a button means reading 5 letters spaced out over two buttons, remove one of the buttons from that room.  Create events that are quick to turn things on for you and in places you know you will want darkness use the single showing OFF button on your orbiter.

Either and both.

Duplex in-wall outlets I personally prefer as I think are a lot cleaner.  The appliance modules to me give the impression that automation was added temporarily and without pre-planning.  While in all honesty they are retrofits in my case, the finished look as we go through the house should be as sleek and modern as possible.  Enough on my opinion though, thank you very much for yours.  I suspected that the audible noise was a direct result of me being cheap.

Another successful card.  This was onboard equipment for a couple year old eMachine. 128MB dedicated video memory.

00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 6150SE nForce 430] (rev a2)

Running VGA 1920 X 1080 60Hz, UI2 (medium) with slight chop currently.  720 I am sure will produce much smoother operation and I will post results if I still have problems smoothing it out.

The wiki has some pages under the category: Hardware.  This is a great place to start.  When I based my research off of those recommendations I have never had a problem with having a plug and play experience. After you have read over that and learned some of the basics you can then come to these forums and search specific hardware models to see if anyone else has had experience good or bad with it.  Up to a point the better/faster your core machine is the better experience you will have with testing out LMCE and hopefully sticking with it and adding devices.  Below are some of my experiences with hardware that may give you some starting search points.

I prefer nVidia over ATI or Intel graphics cards. L3mce has written some really nice detection scripts that pick up cards of all makes but I find the nVidia driver packages available to offer more configuration options than ATI which just works.
The magic number for getting smooth UI2 w/ alpha blending in 1920 x 1080 for me has been 256MB, I am sure with current drivers and some tinkering a good 128MB card could run 1080 but it probably won't be capable out of the box.
In all of my tinkering with old junk hardware I have come across a single onboard sound card that was not automagically configured.  For a true audiophile I am sure nothing short of optical out would be sufficient but my untrained ear can not tell the difference either way.
Go for gigabit support on your second NIC card, do not skimp on this.  The extra couple bucks here makes a giant difference later when you start adding network devices.
Plan ahead for adding IO, if you are comparing two similar main boards and one has twice the PCI slots do it.  Though a lot of USB devices are supported having a spare PCI slot to add a soundcard for squeeze or a capture card for DVR/cameras is always nice.
Be very patient when asking for help, if you are willing to be patient, follow directions exactly and contribute with feedback from your experience you will find more than enough support to get you going.

You can get to specific user pages by following my link below, many users have posted detailed information about their systems including specific model numbers.

I owe a big thanks to whomever contributed to the the current z-wave detection processes.  That was one of if not the smoothest setups I have had with LMCE to date. 
@hari, tschak909 I know you two for sure, nice work. 

In fact the Sarah wizard not only detected everything but walked me through how to include devices using the exact model controller I have.  Obviously this was intended to be an example but without a manual I would not have known that holding include resulted in a copy prompt.  Very well written!  Hopefully as my system grows I can contribute any device templates I come across that do not have pnp support already.

I don't think it's a mystery to anyone here that I am cheap.  I bought the cheapest wall plug I could find after a few weeks watching eBay, Intermatic InTouch CA3500.  Although it works just fine there is a very noticeable "POP" of the contactor opening and closing.  Since I do not have experience with these devices I do not know if I would call it excessive or not, it may be normal. 

For those of you who have been using z-wave for a while and have used devices by different manufactures, are the higher $ devices quieter?  From my browsing and price comparisons there is a steep jump in price between manufacturers including used hardware. At the bottom of the barrel as far as I can tell is Intermatic, Wayne Dalton and GE being middle of the road and then a big jump to Cooper and other 'premium' makes.

I am familiar with Cooper from my days doing NFPA 70-E training but how their products compare I have no idea.  As "quality of construction" is not going to be listed on any spec sheets I am hoping for user experience for recommendations on that all important quality/price comparison. 

*tkmedia, I checked LMCECompatible and didn't see a make, though the other devices you carry for in-wall seem to all be Wayne Dalton.  Message me please.

*totallymaxxed, I can't imagine a quality of construction difference between US and European standard made devices so would really appreciate your input since you have wired hundreds of devices in homes where I am sure the customers are pretty critical about switch noise.
 

Of course things never end up as easy as you expect them to be.

I am still working on this however and will get it resolved.  The problem at the moment is, I am not sure the keyboard buttons I am altering are the correct keyboard buttons, the orbiter keyboard buttons I was checking device data on may or may not be the orbiter buttons and the device I am telling all these buttons to go to may or may not be the browser.

Either QuickDesigner is not the proper tool for this or I do not yet know how to look for things in it.  So far I can not have it produce a list of device #s or action #s.  These would be extremely helpful in testing.  The menus I am able to navigate actually show about 13 varieties of *browser* so at this point I am somewhat guessing when I make changes.  Also the "where used" option does not seem to be working, that alone could be used to give me the screen where the mousepad is used,  I could query objects in that screen and know exactly where those buttons send their outputs.  This is what I thought I had already with device -300 which again I am not sure what device that actually is.

Last, something that really confuses me about the onscreen keyboard is that with no changes at all the buttons sometimes work.  I believe this is due to a stay active command for the browser.  Click on the browser and you get a flashing cursor where you would enter text.  When you move down to the onscreen keyboard the mouse icon changes to a large cross, clicking on the keyboard buttons then makes the keyboard active and deactivates the browser.  To break this function, navigate to a page with saved username or password fields (or probably any site with this type of drop down menu) begin entry into the username field until a drop down menu appears. Now when you move the mouse icon down to the keyboard the icon does not change shape and ONE button click will make it through to the browser.

Thoughts on the above work around:  Because no button I found was mapped to a specific application and was instead blank indicating the command should be sent to DCE, the fix for this may not be in keyboard button settings at all, but in the change from "mouse position over browser" and "mouse position over virtual keyboard."  Again I have maybe two hours into tinkering with this only at this point.

Does anyone happen to know of a live DL location for HADesigner?  Some of the search tips and commands I am getting are for use in that program.

Sorry JaseP, no luck on that.

I actually already have the solution, I just need to learn the language of program and PK naming to implement it.

When you have two similar things and one works but the other doesn't.  You can start by asking what one is doing wrong or you can ask what one is doing right.

The standard roaming orbiter sends its keyboard commands to the browser just fine.  The on-screen orbiter does not.  My first step will be to find the object associated with the roaming orbiter's buttons and see what they do.  Apply that to the objects (buttons) associated with the on-screen keyboard and it should just be a matter of changing that 102 times to have the clicks going to the browser.

The one monkey wrench I see possible and I will cross that bridge if it comes up is that pressing the keys on the virtual keyboard seems to deselect the browser window, that may be a function of orbiter intercepting the command and sending it somewhere else, I haven't tested that much yet.

The last parameter I found interesting was that the name field for these buttons contained no entries.  It states clearly in the ADD popup that if you dont specify a name the command goes to DCE.  I will need to tinker some but I am certain one of the thought trains above will get me there.  I also have webBrowser and webMozilla to sort out, but again once I figure out where quickdesigner is hiding the roaming orb keyboard commands I will know a lot more.

Thanks for this project, it kicked me in the butt to finally get into designer and really seeing this process.

Okay I now have the ability to take on the keyboard task,  give me a little while to crash course myself into understanding the various fields and inputs and I will let you know when I have something.

Okay its functional,  I was being an idiot and if I wasnt copy pasting commands without thinking about what they do I would have figured this out sooner.

GRANT PERMISSIONS ~ verify with "password"

I entered the database settings as "nopass" 

So I changed the QuickDesigner.properties txt file to read "password"

Thanks for your patience.

okay it took me a while but I found the command to get into mysql

from mysql >

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON pluto_main.* TO anonymous@192.168.80.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

The response from mysql was:
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)

I typed exit until I was back as my username at Desktop

I tried again to run QuickDesigner and am getting the same access denied error.


I also looked for HADesigner dl link on the wiki but was unable to find it, is it still available?

I am again stuck on getting this application launched so that I can continue working on skins and other recent requests such as the onscreen keyboard.  Below are my exact commands and inputs.

From this link
- I download  http://deb.linuxmce.org/QuickDesigner.tar.gz

It places the tar.gz in my Desktop folder so I navigate there and enter

tar -zxvf QuickDesigner.tar.gzar

This unpacks 6 .jar files into a new folder /Desktop/lib and places a single QuickDesigner.jar in my Desktop folder

Per the wiki I enter this command

java -Xmx256m -jar QuickDesigner.jar

A popup window comes up and has the following fields autopopulated and two fields blank

mySQL server address     192.168.80.1
mySQL server port          3306
database name               pluto_main
user name
user password

I enter anonymous nopass as a guess because that is what is populated for the schema database in the admin page

as soon as I press enter I get more than I would copy paste here, and because its error spam I dont know how I could do a pastebin command.

The summary of this output that looks like a possible error to me is:

Internal Exception: java.sql.SQLException: Access denied for user 'anonymous'@'192.168.80.1' (using password: YES)

I see this and then a list of the files I recognise from the Desktop/lib folder plus others that are new.  At the end of this list is the words "... 34 more"

This spam repeats over and over.

Perhaps I misunderstood the fate of the current orbiter.  I was under the impression that a complete replacement was sought and that time spent adding features under QuickDesigner or HA Designer was better spent getting qOrbiter on its feet?

Am I oversimplifying this, and will there still be need for someone to be the local pro on Orbiter?

Just wanted to share that experience.  I have my page up now and is probably as far as I will go with it.

I would like to offer my experience today getting signed into the wiki.

I was unable to use my username and password from the forums to sign into the wiki.  I triple checked my password by logging out of the forums and having to manually type username and password back in.  I then went to the wiki and typed the same username and password to have it tell me that there was no user by that name.

I then created a new user account "armorgnome2" using a separate email account and was able to sign into the wiki.  Perhaps because my account was created in 2009 and never registered with the wiki then I somehow was not included in a database of current users that the wiki looks at?

I also agree that the register process was confusing as the link says "login or register" but there is no instruction or link to register with the forums at that destination.