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DIY home automation console


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Posted (edited)

Recently I renovated our guest room and wanted to provide a way for our guests to control the lights and devices within that room without giving them access to the other lights and devices throughout the rest of our home.

To do this I created a home automation console built from:

  • A SmartiPi Touch Pro case
  • A Raspberry Pi Official 7 Inch Touch Screen
  • A Raspberry Pi 3B+
  • And some custom programing in Xojo

These components combined make for a pretty nice package. I really like the SmartiPi Touch Pro case. I’ve been looking for a Raspberry Pi case that looked better than the typical high school science project and the SmartiPi case looks good enough to have achieved wife approval (not an easy thing to do.)

I really appreciate that I can make calls to the REST API on my ISY994i from my Xojo code. The REST API is easy to use and opens up a lot of possibilities for projects like this one.

So now I have a dead-simple home automation console for our guest room.

-Wes

IMG_20221203_141528

IMG_20221203_141600
Edited by Wes Westhaver
  • Like 8
Posted
23 hours ago, Goose66 said:

Wow! Is the code on GitHub?

To tell the truth, I hadn't even thought of sharing the code. Give me a little time to carve out any private info embedded in the code and then I'll make it available.

Are you familiar with Xojo? You'll need to download the free version of Xojo to view/edit/run the code.

You can find Xojo here.

-Wes

 

Posted
13 hours ago, Goose66 said:

I assume you used the free version on the RPi or did you code on PC/Mac then download to RPi?

Well, there are a couple points to understand:

1) The Xojo Development Environment doesn't run on a Raspberry Pi. It has to be run on a Windows or Mac or Linux PC.

2) Without a Xojo license you can only run code inside the Xojo Development Environment. A Xojo license is required to create stand-alone executable programs that can be deployed to the Raspberry Pi.

So, if you download a copy of Xojo, you can load my code, view it and even run it locally in the development environment but you can't run it on a Raspberry Pi unless you purchase a Xojo license.

Having said all of that, I think Xojo is the best programming environment I have ever come across as it allows you to write programs that run on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Web) and is a very approachable language.

-Wes

  • Like 1
  • 3 weeks later...
Posted
On 12/22/2022 at 2:46 PM, Goose66 said:

Wow! Is the code on GitHub?

@Goose66

I've posted the code on my website at:

http://www.westhaver.com/guest_suite_console.xojo_binary_project

I saved the program as a xojo binary project so that all the various modules etc. are bundled into a single downloadable file. This makes it much easier to share a project. You should be able to load it into the 'free' version of Xojo and view the code.

-Wes

  • Like 1
Posted (edited)

@Wes Westhaver

I really appreciate you sharing this work with the community. I just loaded up the project you had shared and had a few errors. I'm sure they are simple to correct with your help. Can you point me to where you found these icons? I'm sure I could experiment and find my own, but I thought I'd ask first.

2023-01-11_12-12-08.png

Thank you!

Kaz

Edited by kzboray
Posted
22 minutes ago, kzboray said:

@Wes Westhaver

I really appreciate you sharing this work with the community. I just loaded up the project you had shared and had a few errors. I'm sure they are simple to correct with your help. Can you point me to where you found these icons? I'm sure I could experiment and find my own, but I thought I'd ask first.

2023-01-11_12-12-08.png

Thank you!

Kaz

Ooops! Sorry. I overlooked those external resources and forgot to package them into the Xojo binary project file.

I've uploaded a new file. You should be able to download it from the link I provided earlier.

-Wes

 

  • Like 1
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, kzboray said:

@Wes Westhaver Still not working, but no rush. I'll check back later tonight.

Thank you again!

 

Kaz

Try downloading the .zip file below:

http://www.westhaver.com/guest_suite_console.zip

It will create a folder called "guest_suite_console" containing the Xojo binary project file and an icon folder containing the needed icons.

Let me know if that works for you. It appears that Xojo will consolidate all the components of a project into a binary file except for the icon files. Go figure... Anyway the .zip file should get you up and going. Sorry for the confusion. I rarely use Xojo's binary project option and I assumed it would work in a way that it doesn't.

-Wes

Edited by Wes Westhaver
  • Thanks 3
  • 1 month later...
Posted
On 1/11/2023 at 5:12 PM, Wes Westhaver said:

Try downloading the .zip file below:

http://www.westhaver.com/guest_suite_console.zip

It will create a folder called "guest_suite_console" containing the Xojo binary project file and an icon folder containing the needed icons.

Let me know if that works for you. It appears that Xojo will consolidate all the components of a project into a binary file except for the icon files. Go figure... Anyway the .zip file should get you up and going. Sorry for the confusion. I rarely use Xojo's binary project option and I assumed it would work in a way that it doesn't.

-Wes

Amazing job @Wes Westhaver . For the rest of us that for whom that this is a bit out of our skill reach...anyone know if a purchaseable product like this exists that can be somehow tied to our ISY/EISY? 

  To half answer my own question, cruising through the z-wave alliance site I found a product called the IQ Panel made by Qolsys, but can't find a place to buy one or a current price, and I'm really not familiar with how well it would integrate, but it appears to be geared to alarms and has Z-Wave communication among many others. Seems easy to imagine how it could control Z-Wave products, but for myself and probably most of us, we'd still want the ISY/EISY to be 'THE' controller and for this to be merely a configurable display station of sorts. 

   Mayyyyyybe if we could find a 'simple' mountable display that runs android and is capable of running UD-Mobile???? Mayyyybe that would be the easiest route for this? ... Maybe not. Anyways, would love to hear what people know of this concept and existing products that ideally don't require programming in a different language. THANKS!

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