LinuxMCE and Misterhouse

[DeadPenguin]

I have been wanting to put together a media/x10/security cam solution for the last year. I had planned on using Misterhouse until I stumbled over LinuxMCE on youtube.

Here is a list of the stuff I have put together over the last year:
4 - installed and wired 30 LED cctv cams.
1- kodicom capture card. (works with linux - I have used it with zoneminder)
1- CM11 and a handfull of x10 contollers/recievers/remotes.
1- NAS with most of my media on it.
1- Dell server w/ dual 1ghz 1gb ram and for now 140gb 10k scsi drives (if not enough power I will upgrade.)
1- small form factor pc in my bedroom. (P4 2.4 1gb ram 250gb HD.) Hoping to use this as a MD.
1- Oregon Scientific WMR968 Weather Station.
I had and old wintv tv capture card. (thinking to upgrade to the pvr-500 if everything works)


I am having a hard time deciding between MH and LinuxMCE.  Misterhouse can do everything I need except streaming video and the learning curve is very steep.. LinuxMCE can do most of what I want (Media streaming) but does not have voice recognition and a module for weather station and some of the plugin functionality provided by MH with Perl add ons.(ie. the comic strip viewer, http://w3.misterhouse.net:8090/bin/code_select.pl )

Is there any way to get LinuxMCE to handle logging my weather info? Is there any voice recognition module?
Neither of these are deal stoppers I can run a seperate machine to log the weather info, and voice rec would be nice but not necessary. A nice gyro mouse will do.

I am not sure my old server will handle LinuxMCE. For now I just wanted to run the one md in my bedroom going to 3 or 4 mds if everything goes OK. I have seen some real nice dual 3.0 xeons on Ebay for a decent price.

Regards,
Blair

[k84]

I would've gone for misterhouse (mainly because there is a very nice set of developers actively working on the project) and the mail lists are just so helpfull for everyone having a problem.

I've been using linuxmce since the day it first got launched, and i need to say that i'm very happy with the way it presents media, but it has to many bugs and to few updates.

What would be nice is to have misterhouse & linuxmce working together (shouldnt be to hard)
Misterhouse has the advantage of easy programming what YOU want, instead of playing around with the event system in lmce.

[DeadPenguin]

I like MH.  The learning curve is on the steep side. I don't know if I am going to have the time to learn Perl to make things happen.
I am using gentoo 2007.0 now and to get get MH up and running is as easy as "emerge misterhouse" "perl mh".
BUT, the lack of MYTHTV integration in MH is a dealstopper.
Plus there is no MH forum.(AFIK) I could only find mailing lists.

I REALLY like how easy LINUXMCE makes media.
X-10 and media would be my major uses of this type a system. 

There are a bunch of ways to approach this.  I just want the easiest.  There are a bunch of linux apps that would handle my needs. (Mythtv, zoneminder, bottlerocket, wxlog.) I just would rather have everything in one place.

LinuxMCE/Plutohome look like they come the closest to what I want with the least amount of effort. Misterhouse has everything I need except video with a lot of learning to set up the way I want.

[bulek]

Hi,

I think that you don't have to choose - you can use both of them - I also plan to do the same. Misterhouse is really nice backend, quite easy to learn and customize... LMCE is great GUI, with probably crippled backend functionality, so I guess using both of them would make a nice combination...

See http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Misterhouse

I can help, if you decide to go that route...

Regards,

Bulek....

[DeadPenguin]

I agree I wish I could find something with the functionality of both wrapped into one.

I could run both. Using LinuxMCE soley for the media content/ cams / pbx  and Misterhouse mainly for x-10 / weather / etc.

Blair

[bulek]

I agree I wish I could find something with the functionality of both wrapped into one.

I could run both. Using LinuxMCE soley for the media content/ cams / pbx  and Misterhouse mainly for x-10 / weather / etc.

Blair

I think it would not be too hard, but I guess it would be much easier if few guys familiar with MH and Perl and some with LMCE get together... On LMCE side we just need clean way of showing things on Orbiters (weather, temperatures, support for devices that MH controls,etc...). On MH side we need simple listener and few modules to connect to LMCE or Pluto....

Any guys around willing to tackle this ? I can help (I'm pretty familiar with both system), but currently just don't have anough time to do it by myself... I'm also lousy programmer, so experienced Perl guy would be of tremendous help...

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Hi,

I think that you don't have to choose - you can use both of them - I also plan to do the same. Misterhouse is really nice backend, quite easy to learn and customize... LMCE is great GUI, with probably crippled backend functionality, so I guess using both of them would make a nice combination...

See http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Misterhouse

I can help, if you decide to go that route...

Regards,

Bulek....

Can you flesh out the wiki page a bit more if you have some experience? It would be good to see how to:

1. Add misterhouse to LMCE as a parent (this already seems to be covered)
2. Add a light to a room, controlled by MH parent
3. Configure MH to listen for the right commands and control light
4. Finally be able to turn light on/off and dim from the floorplan on LMCE

I can add my MH configuration which shows how to do motion detection firing lights in MH, as this is currently not something I can do in LME (which is why I am still running MH).

Chris

[bulek]

Hi,

I think that you don't have to choose - you can use both of them - I also plan to do the same.  Misterhouse is really nice backend, quite easy to learn and customize... LMCE is great GUI, with probably crippled backend functionality, so I guess using both of them would make a nice combination...

See http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Misterhouse

I can help, if you decide to go that route...

Regards,

Bulek....

Can you flesh out the wiki page a bit more if you have some experience? It would be good to see how to:

1. Add misterhouse to LMCE as a parent (this already seems to be covered)
2. Add a light to a room, controlled by MH parent
3. Configure MH to listen for the right commands and control light
4. Finally be able to turn light on/off and dim from the floorplan on LMCE

I can add my MH configuration which shows how to do motion detection firing lights in MH, as this is currently not something I can do in LME (which is why I am still running MH).

Chris

Sorry really busy at the moment, but you do a lot by yourself. I'd recomend follwing way :
 1. get more familiar with DCE messages :

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Sensors
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/MessageSend

There you can see how to send messages to control various devices or to report change in state via events... Start Orbiter, send events, commands and see how it reacts... You can also send message to each device over web-admin (and it even prints what is command line syntax for sending that message - it's nice to see and learn)...

 2. How to connect to LMCE :

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Plain_Text_DCE_Messages

I guess text interface would be easy for a start... Try that basic code, register with LMCE and see what messages you'll get. You add Misterhouse as device, and add some child devices (thermostat,thermometer, light, etc...) - be sure they don't have "Implements DCE" ticked. In  this case all messages for those devices will be routed to their parent  -so your code will receive them...

 3. Description of DCE commands, events...

Go into Web-Admin -> Advanced -> DCE and you can get more info on commands, events, etc...


So basically LMCE-MH integration should do this :
- MH registers as parent device for all devices it controls
- MH registers as message interceptor for other LMCE not being children devices...
- then do endless loop :
      1.  child devices:
      1a. receive commands from LMCE and control them accordingly
      1.b if anything under MH changes state of some device, send proper event to  LMCE, so it will change its state in its own data and on Floorplan

      2.  other LMCE devices :
      2a. intercept events for those devices and update MH data accordingly (if LMCE changed their state)
      2b. send proper commands to them if something under MH wants to change their state.

      ?? not sure, maybe something else is also needed here... 

In this way we could have wrapper code to integrate beside automation devices even mp3player under MH as media player to LMCE and vice versa. But as previously said, I'd like to have an helping hand on MH side - it would be nice if MH could automatically expose all its devices to LMCE and also take all other LMCE devices for it self - so integration could be done in fully transparent way...

MH is really nice as backend machine, generating all sorts of reminders, speech announcements etc.. LMCE is particularly strong in giving nice GUI and convenient control of devices into user's hand... Using both of them would enhance system dramatically...I've tried several times posting to MH's mailing lists, but it seems that LMCE is not so popular in this community to give a hand on integration..

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.

[mmiller]

Newbee to Linuxmce tried Pluto once, didnt work out. Have been running Misterhouse for a number of years, switched to Kubuntu from winwoes about a year ago waiting on LMCE710 to do a rebuild and try them both together. Will keep you posted....I'm not much of a programer either.
Mark

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Found this:

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=391.0

So I leant some perl today and wrote this bit of code you can add to the above piece:

Code: [Select]

if (my $msg = said $pluto_device_event_receiver) {
        print_log "Pluto Device Message received: $msg\n";

        $msg =~ s/[\"\']//g;    # remove quotes before splitting on whitespace

        if ($msg =~/(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)\s(\w*)/ ) {
                print_log "DeviceFrom: $1";
                print_log "DeviceTo:: $2";
                print_log "MsgType: $3 (1=Command, 2=Event)";
                print_log "MsgId: $4";
                print_log "param1id: $5";
                print_log "param2value (X10 Device): $6";
                print_log "param2id: $7";
                print_log "param2value (X10 Command): $8";
                if ($8 == '192') {
                  print_log "Turn $6 ON";
                  set $6 ON;
                }
                if ($8 == '193') {
                  print_log "Turn $6 OFF";
                  set $6 OFF;
                }
        }
}

It works! You can add lights and control from LMCE. Working on getting motion detectors to feed into LMCE now, it is finished and just needs testing.

Chris

[dnadeau]

Are you all running misterhouse on the core? If so, did you just use apt to install it?

[tschak909]

why the hell are you guys doing this? especially when pluto does what misterhouse does, better?

"Waaah, I don't wanna write GSD drivers!"

it's not hard, guys, let's put some effort up front to make it easier for all of us later.

-Thom

[blackoper]

umm because misterhouse has more hardware support and it's easier to script?

[tschak909]

(a) the whole scripting infrastructure is much more robust than misterhouse, you wind up writing less code to support a new device. MH's code is a clusterfucked mess.

(b) we would HAVE more device support if more people would look at the existing device templates and base new devices on them.

come on guys, use your brains.

-Thom

[bulek]

why the hell are you guys doing this? especially when pluto does what misterhouse does, better?

I disagree. Try to write some custom event handler in your favourite prog. language to add some behaviour to system... For instance "event handler plugin module" that would interact with LMCE and send speech announcements etc... LMCE support for adding custom event handling is currently crippled. You can write GSD, but only as device drivers in Ruby. But only if you have such application that is happy to be called every 2 secs (time varies a lot)... This is way to loog interval to write some decent plugin for handling events etc...

What is really missing is to have plugin system, so plugins could be written in several popular languages... But also plugins must be called more frequently than somewhere in between 1 and 2 secs...

Also we need mechanism to make those modules as contributions and reusable for other users... AFAIK, we're miles from that point, except of limited functionality of Ruby and GSD..

"Waaah, I don't wanna write GSD drivers!"

it's not hard, guys, let's put some effort up front to make it easier for all of us later.

-Thom

I fully agree, but... as lousy programmer wrote few mockups code (also to connect Misterhouse and Pluto), but you can guess how many people tried to contribute further on it.... I also got no response in Misterhouse community.

But still if I have to choose between MH and LMCE, I'd still clearly pick up MH, cause it has clear contribution path, is rather well organised and you can implement and contribute things quite easily - and a lot of people is already doing this... This is still level, where LMCE should come to one day... Hopefully very soon.... LMCE's support for adding event or device plugins in popular languages like Perl, Python, etc.. would tremendously enhance contributions from community...

I've tried to contribute many things to Pluto at earlier time, but couldn't do anything without approval and help of main developers, so my contributions are lost somewhere in the dust of my disk and I'm not sure if I'm willing to recode them again (it was either like "now we're feature freezed", or "wait for new release" that came months after that and then it got freezed, etc...)... And then of course, I go and do it under Misterhouse and that's it...
No special efforts needed...

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.