Messages

1

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Community manager?

« on: May 05, 2009, 02:54:28 pm »

Rapid updates on front page is noted and appreciated!

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

2

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Community manager?

« on: April 28, 2009, 02:34:07 pm »

From now on, we shall spam the front page a bit more.

Would it be possible to add some stuff to the front page automatically? F.ex. "new build", "bug number xxx solved", "number of downloads since sometime", "hottest thread on forum this today"? Not sure if it's actually that useful, but it would make the front page appear more active.

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

3

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Documentation / Wiki overhaul

« on: April 27, 2009, 10:35:31 am »

I would offer to do this myself, but I don't have my system built yet and so it really would be the "blind leading the blind".

Sounds like a perfect way to start if you ask me. You'll know what questions to ask if nothing else.

And I completely agree with you, the wiki needs some lovin'.

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

4

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Community manager?

« on: April 27, 2009, 10:33:14 am »

From now on, we shall spam the front page a bit more.

Even though the above might sound a bit tacky, I mean it.

To me it sounds spot on. Better with too much than too little. People can always ignore things which aren't interesting, but you can't see the interesting thing which isn't there.

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

5

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Community manager?

« on: April 27, 2009, 08:58:46 am »

We have a community manager. He is currently on extended private leave.
During his absence, some of the core devs are taken care of the day to day business.

Well that explains a lot. Maybe an interim community manager might be a good idea.

Regarding the lack of update on the homepage. Yes, there is not much news. Unfortunately, we have not much to say.

The thing is, there might not be much news in your opinion, however people still want news. People want to see the front page updated with anything that makes them feel that things are moving forward. I'm not expecting release dates or any profound information, but there is so much that can be written about that help create a buzz.

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

6

Feature requests & roadmap / Community manager?

« on: April 24, 2009, 02:36:45 pm »

Hi guys,

I'm not sure if this has been covered before, but I'm curious if there is any community manager or if this has been discussed.

The LinuxMCE.org frontpage is as good as dead, anyone keep an eye on the progress of LMCE is forced to read on the forums and even then it's not really clear what, if anything, is happening.

News stories on LMCE have dwindled to near nothing. I can't remember last time I saw LMCE mentioned on the frontpage of slashdot or linuxtoday.

Developers are attracted to projects that are active and that show progress, and at the moment there is no visible progress nor activity.

Even the two links the top of the page where i'm writing this (help wanted and roadmap) go to 404's!

My suggestion is (if any consensus at all can be achieved on this), appoint a community manager to; collect updates from developers and post them on the front page, make interviews with the developers and post them, collect information from the message boards and post them, write news pieces for news sites, organize testers and gather feedback for the developers, evangelize in general.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Tor Magnus

7

Developers / Re: Calling all UI Designers for new Basic Skin

« on: January 02, 2009, 09:22:03 am »

Sorry to come a bit out of the blue here, but from what I understand of the UI it's currently using bitmap images which are placed around the screen according to some kind of system. These bitmaps are prescaled to the size of the screen when installed or when a UI rebuild is requested.

Now if I've understood that correctly and also understood other comments correctly then it would seem that there are some issues with this approach as bitmaps can get distorted when f.ex. downscaling.

I appreciate that this is the way it works and that redoing it is not an option, however, would it be possible to make it take SVG images instead as these should rescale better? Scaling of svg images should be faster, give more accurate results and I imagine it would not require an extensive rewriting of the code.

Comments?

8

Users / Re: Radiator zone valves

« on: September 06, 2008, 04:21:41 pm »

I guess going forward support for this device:
http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/New-Products/Danfoss-Launch-Z-Wave-Radiator-Thermostat.html
could be added.  it is a Z-wave motorised radiator control valve

That looks quite interesting. Unfortunately for me it's yet another system, however I guess that might be the only way...

9

Users / Re: Radiator zone valves

« on: September 06, 2008, 04:20:09 pm »

just a heads up - last time I checked, LMCE had a device template for a 1-wire usb interface, however it appeared to be incomplete and did not work last I checked.

Hm. That's not good. I'm rather surprised by that as it seems to have good support in other HA applications. I guess I have to get into Ruby as from what I gather it's fairly easy to extend...

Also, just to share my plan for heating this winter (I will be using a centralized heat source - a corn burner). I plan to have temperature sensors in each room which control a fan or series of fans for each room which will be used to "move" the heat from the central room throughout the house. For instance, if a bedroom upstairs gets too cold, it will kick on a fan at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top of the stairs pointing towards that room. Then have each room set up like this, controlling fans independantly to circulate the heat to where it is needed. I've been experimenting with this for the last month or so with some promising results (If it works well enough, I will permanently cut holes and mount fans above every dooway in the house to make it an integral part of my heating/cooling system)

Living in a flat over two stories built of bricks it's unfortunately not a good solution because of limited space, looks and noise limitation between rooms. I'd certainly go for a recycling HVAC system if I were to build a new house though.

10

Users / Radiator zone valves

« on: September 05, 2008, 12:05:25 pm »

I'm currently renovating a flat and I'm having central heating installed. Unfortunately having a manifold with separate zones would be too expensive to do, so I'm considering getting motorized radiator zone valves that I can add over time, turning each room into a separate zone and using 1-wire thermometers/linuxmce as thermostats. I've looked at what's out there and there seem to be a few options. Either Honeywell (proprietary protocol), Siemens (DDC driven) and others like them.

Does anyone have any experience with integrating this? How have you achieved this? I'd like to control them either by 1-wire or plcbus if possible.

11

Users / Re: Xanura / A10

« on: January 11, 2008, 09:43:06 am »

Yeah, I've had a look at PLCBUS as well, buy I couldn't get a clear view of advantages and disadvantages with it. Hadn't spotted the GSD stuff before I guess that should make it easy to write a device specific handler for the A10 devices.

I'm still a few months away from actually implementing any of this. My plan involves buying a few devices to start playing around with, but to be honest, it's getting harder and harder to actually select any of these competing - sometimes partly cooperating - standards...

12

Users / Xanura / A10

« on: January 09, 2008, 10:09:55 am »

This is a repost from Pluto forums but I'm reposting it here as there seems to be more traffic here and linuxMCE and Pluto seems pretty interchangable.

I've been looking at various HA solutions for a while now and Pluto seems to fit most of my requirements so that's probably what I'm going to go with.

The difficult point seems to be what hardware solution to go for. X10 seems to be well supported, but I hear about a lot of problems with it, some are US (110V) only so they're right out (I'm in the Netherlands atm). Some are simply not supported by Pluto yet which would make me have to re-evaluate software solution.

My current favorite is A10 devices from Xanura. They seem well built and the A10 spec seems to be a good improvement on the X10 spec, addressing most of the issues I've noticed. I am however not sure it's supported by Pluto, or whether it would be a big effort to support it. According to the material I've seen it should be X10 compatible, but I assume that is on the databus side, not pc interface. I've had a look at the documentation and the serial interface looks very straight forward (and as far as I know could be compatible with X10 interfaces).

Could someone in the know comment on whether this is supported or whether it would be difficult to implement support?

Cheers,
Tor Magnus