Integration with Homeseer

[DavidJ]

Has anyone got any experience of using the Phil Colley Plug-In for Homeseer. I am having some problems with basic scripting to activate X10. Anyone who could help?

Thanks

[lms]

What is it you\'re trying to do?

I\'ve used the plug-in quite successfully with X10. Although I still have problems with X10\'s inherent unreliability, I\'ve moved all my X10 commands from Comfort to Homeseer - much more flexible this way. (Not that I\'m criticising Comfort - just needed to do things that needed several times the memory that Comfort has!)

[DavidJ]

Thanks for responding. I am actually using Comfort to parse the information to Homeseer. So for example HS sends a script to Comfort X10 A1 on. I have actually found this far more reliable than simply using HS and the CM12U, possibly because Comfort is hard wired into the mains. I am not storing these in Comfort.

The things I really need to understand would be: what a script looks like to turn on A! at say 50% dim? How I can make the alarm pad chime? How to activate the outputs? How to control CBus?  Any or all....

Any help/advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks, David

[lms]

Strange - I\'ve found HS and the CM12U more reliable than Comfort & the XM10U (and believe me, I\'ve spent countless hours on this, trying different locations, X10 boosters, and so on) - but I suppose that\'s what you get for using an unreliable protocol such as X10!

If you\'re sending commands to Comfort which then in turn sends the X10 commands, I expect you\'ll have to use Counters to trigger responses in Comfort - so the actual \"script\" has to be done in Comfort. When I want Comfort to execute something triggered within HS, I set a counter to a specific value in HS, such as:

Sub Main
    hs.PlugIn(\"pjcComfort2\").Transmit_SetCounters \"CounterName,Value\"
End Sub

I then have a Comfort response which is triggered by that Counter which can then send the X10 command. The Counter value can dictate to the response to what dim level you want to set the light, but this will have to be coded in a Comfort response. This should not be difficult, but if you have many devices to control, you may run out of memory in Comfort - this is one of the reasons that I\'m doing things in the opposite way.

Similarly, you can have a Comfort response to make the alarm pad chime which is triggered by a specific counter/value which is set in HS. Same with the outputs. I have no experience at all with CBus but would expect something similar.

You can also get HS to respond to Counter changes originating from Comfort (or other Comfort triggers) so this effectively becomes a two-way communication mechanism. I\'ve got some reasonably complex HS scripts which essentially communicate with Comfort responses using this method. For example, an HS script sets Counter to 1 ... Comfort sees the Counter setting, triggering a response which does what it has to do, then sets the Counter to 2 ... HS sees the setting and triggers a further response, and so on. With the large resources on the HS PC, this makes large and complex actions easily possible - the only negative is that the PC has to be continuously running, but this is, in my opinion, a small price to pay and I\'ve installed a dedicated PC.

Do you lnow about the HS message boards at http://board.homeseer.com/ ? Have found this quite useful.

Phil Colley has also been quick at responding on the few occasions when I\'ve had difficulties with the Plug-In - don\'t have his email address handy but you\'ll probably find it on the HS board.

Leon

[slychiu]

Comfort sending data to X10 is very reliable and consistent. However the performance of the XM10E  and CM12U could vary signiificantly abd even from unit to unit affecting the signal amplitude on the power line. Comfort cannot determine the signal strength of the X10 signal as that depends only on the interface device ie XM10E

[TheMax74]

I\'ve spent a lot of time with HS, (Activebackup, SMS plug-in, Saferestart, Kickoff.. are  some plug-ins that i wrote for HS) but finally i bought a Comfort.
Now i can do exactly what i want.
I love HS, and i think it\'s a great product but for real home automation integration and reliability, i think Comfort is the best solution.
Intercom, keypads, doorphone, high level security system, are only some examples that Comfort can do natively, and HS can\'t.
About X10, i had some problems with CM11a, making TX and RX of X10 impossible with HS (CM11a hangs).
Non problems with Comfort and their interface, but yes, sending X10 trough Comfort is a little bit slow.
Sometime , after upgrading my Ultra II from 5.079 to 5.112, in the \"Disarm\" response, some x10 appliances turns on instead of others. This is a little annoying, but has no serious effects, because i use X10 for non critical operations only.
This problem appears only when disarming the alarm system fires a \"Disarm\" response, that turn on some courtesy lights.

Regards.

[DavidJ]

I does\'nt appear that within comfigurator I have any counters set up. Do I understand correctly that counters effectively become the virtual device that communicate with via the UCM to Homeseer?

If thats the case I guess most of what I want to acheive can be created as a counter. In that case is there some simple instructions that explains how to create counters?

Thanks

[lms]

Just to set the record straight.....

I was not intending to start an argument and my comments about X10 were not to criticise Comfort but rather to criticise X10. In my situation there is no doubt that the X10 commands work more reliably from HS than from Comfort but there could be many factors contributing to this. And I still get occasional X10 problems. I suspect that some old wiring is probably the culprit.

Overall I\'m extremely happy with my Comfort and agree with most of what others have posted on this thread.

[DavidJ]

Any chance of answering my last question which formed the basis of the thread?

Thanks

[slychiu]

I am not familiar with Homeseer so my answer applies to counters in general
Refer to the rs232 protocol document in https://www.cytech.biz/Downloads/Files/163/rs232.pdf
There are 256 counters in Comfort which can be used as simple registers or as below.

The command C! to the UCM will set the names counter to  the assigned vaue and activate a Counter Response which can take the value as a parameter. Hence this is a way of sending commands to Comfort

If Comfort changes a counter, it sends the CT command to the UCM port which can serve to update values in the external device ie Homeseer.

Comfort also has an action SEND RS232 to UCM which can send any data string to the UCM


This is a short summary of what can be done via the UCM communications