wxgsi This months “My Automated Home” feature is from Keyvan Rahimian who shows us around his diy IPad based home automation set-up. The system uses an impressively professional looking visual interface in conjunction with with a hardware Ethernet to IR gateway from global Cache to control his AV and Sonos whole house audio systems.
Submission by Keyvan Rahimian : introduction – I have been experimenting with touch-screen based devices for home Automation for a few years now. My first experiences with building a touch interface started with the Lobby suite of applications from Cinemar. considering that then, I have moved to a Philips Pronto 9600 and recently I have been using an iPad with an application called iRule. I have also had a fair level of exposure to Crestron and AMX systems while staying with pals who had their systems installed professionally, typically in conjunction with the Kaleidescape motion picture management system. In lots of cases these systems cost a lot more than a luxury executive car!!
I believe that the iPad is the best touch-screen device available today for HA tasks. The price, battery life, weight, form factor, and sheer appeal of design beats the proprietary touch panels from Crestron & AMX and others. using a 10.5″ Crestron panel at my friend’s house, I found the battery life was so poor that if one fell asleep without docking the panel it would be dead within a 3-4 hours – very bothersome when you wake up and cannot switch the system off!
I as a result started trying to find iPad HA applications. There are a few out there, but a lot of of them are created to act as a front-end to proprietary systems, notably Crestron, CommandFusion, and control 4. Although CommandFusion does seem to support GC devices, it is a very expensive option when compared to iRule. After a bit of research , I selected the 30 day trial version of iRule and purchased the full version after two weeks. I am reasonably delighted with results so far, although in my opinion there is substantial room for improvement.
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Basic operation & principles – The iRule application for iPad / iphone / iPod Touch is distributed by means of the iTunes app store for free. The cost – $50 us – is for obtaining a license for the online builder. any number of devices can have the app installed as long as they all connect and sync from the single builder account. currently I have an iPad (32Gb 3G model) and an iphone (3Gs 16Gb) running the app from the single builder account.
The builder application is “cloud based” and hosted by Google. A Gmail account is required to logon to the builder. like lots of other iOS software solutions, all transfers to the device have to take place “Over The Air” due to the closed nature of Apple’s operating system. as a result each time the interface is altered on the builder, it has to be synced to the device before the changes become effective. The look and feel of the Builder is not a million miles away from the current versions of Pronto pro from Philips. Builder can be run in any browser; but I have found some issues with IE so I use Google’s Chrome which behaves faultlessly with iRule Builder.
The architecture of the system is IP based. The touch device talks to “gateways” over the local WiFi network. The gateways, in turn, translate the IP commands to IR, RS232 or relay – using global Cache hardware. The gateway, in some instances, may operated by means of a direct TCP/IP interface. usually these devices may be PCs running Windows Media Centre or AV Receivers with Ethernet ports. A full list of supported devices can be found at company’s website: www.iruleathome.com
The development process starts by building “panels” either from scratch or by editing some of the supplied templates. A panel consists of one or a lot more landscape or portrait pages with buttons which execute commands (single or multiple – i.e. macros) or links when pressed / touched. A link will navigate to another page and a command will control a gateway.
In my setup, I have 2 checking out zones, each with Windows based SFF HTPCs running MyMovies under WMC and wired IR iTach devices for controlling the AV Receivers, sky HD boxes and plasma displays. The iTach devices are very easy to install and configure. In buy to control WMC and additional, complimentary server software needs to be installed on the target PC. I use MCE controller but an alternative is event Ghost, which while a a lot more powerful solution, requires a lot more work. The main advantage of event Ghost is multiple connections; MCE only supports one connected client per session. iRule also supports Wake On Lan which is a need to for “waking up” HTPCs from standby power saving mode.
In addition to commands and links, iRule has a few other interesting control options. the most significant being gesture control. any panel can have gesture control enabled in the builder. Commands and links can be assigned to gestures. The supported gestures are swipe and tap, using single or double fingers with assignable commands for each gesture. There is a minor caveat here: if a panel has a lot more than one page, then swiping left/right will step from one page to another and thus supersede gesture control. The trick I use is that I build my major control panels/pages in landscape. I then build a single portrait page for that activity (Sky, MyMovies/WMC, etc.). When the iPad is rotated the portrait page is automatically displayed in place of its landscape peer. This is the page which responds to the gesture commands and as there is only one page, then swiping does not navigate to the page next to it. alternatively you can build a single-paged panel for gesture control and link to it from other pages. Motions can also be utilised in this manner in iRule. These are wrist actions to left, right, up and down; much like game play. I don’t use this feature so I shall not comment on the usefulness of movements. Gestures however work very nicely for flicking through my on-screen covers for motion pictures and music on WMC and then tapping to play when the desired album/movie is highlighted. This also works very nicely on my iphone interface where there is less room for lots of buttons on the touch screen and single finger – or thumb in this case – swipes makes arrow type navigation a one handed operation. You can use left-right for channel flipping and up-down for volume with the iphone in one hand without looking away from the TV. An operation which lots of find not so natural using big touch-screens and having to look down/away from the TV. Something which puts lots of people off touch only devices.
The other interesting concept is that of “entrances”. These are commands which are carried out when a panel is navigated to or “entered into..”. usually this is beneficial for input switching so that anytime a control panel/page is displayed/called then right inputs are selected for AV or display HDMI ports, etc. any command or series of commands can be carried out in entrances.
Devices supported – The list of devices supported is large and growing. There is a list on the developers website. In the IR spectrum, it comes down to what GC devices support, which is pretty comprehensive. GC devices can also learn IR codes. One point worth noting is that only the new iTach line of hardware supports multiple concurrent connections. The GC-100 models can only support a single connection at a time. This is crucial if a lot more than one iPad/iPhone needs to control the same GC gateway in a multi panel home. The flexibility which the iTach line of products supply – IR, RS232, and relays both in wired, POE, and wireless variants – cater for nearly all types of installation, are not hugely over-priced, and for me so far have been solid performers. Although the documentation and web site support need some improvement. It took me ages to find out how to reset my iTach which came with the IR ports locked! It’s also worth mentioning that the three IR output ports on the iTach are individually selected and allocated to IR devices when configuring the gateway. Each port can have multiple devices attached on the gateway. This indicates that dual IR emitters or the IR blaster on the third IR out port can be used to control a lot more than one IR device.
The use of TCP/IP as a control protocol seems to be the future of HA control. iRule currently does a affordable job of supporting this protocol. This is undoubtedly somewhat subjective and varies from device to device. lots of manufactures of AV equipment are and will be introducing their own iOS apps for controlling their network connected flat panels and AV receivers. some of them are reluctant to publish command tables so it’s worth researching the AV devices if you have not already purchased. Denon and Onkyo seem to be well supported as do network enabled flat panels from Samsung and LG. Generally, there seems to be good support available for a lot of HTTP gateways available at this time and it seems relatively easy to build a device driver, although this is not something which I have attempted to date. lots of readers here may be pleased to hear that XMBC is supported using HTTP control.
The discussion of supported devices with their own native apps brings us to an issue which is likely to be encountered with any iOS based control software today. Take this case as an example: like lots of users here, SONOS is my multi-zone music management system of choice. recently they released their iPad app which looks and works great. It is unlikely that any third party building-block based software can or will produce a better or even remotely comparable interface. even if it can, why reinvent a near best wheel? When using iRule, I can only navigate to a splash screen, which selects the Sonos player audio input for that zone. It then “instructs” the user on thisscreen to exit to iPad home menu with the hard button and then tap the Sonos app to manage music playback. hardly ideal..!!
The same is true of the soon to be released iPad app for MyMovies which will allow users to browse through their collection on the iPad and select the desired motion picture for playback – a great alternative to on-screen collection browsing, particularly if one wishes to jump through genres, recently added movies, or find titles using text search, etc. The same would apply for those looking forward to the PLEX control apps which are in the works. Apple TV and Remote from Apple is another example. Although I believe the developers are supplying HTTP control for the new Apple TV.
However, in my view having to exit and enter several different apps detracts from the experience of a comprehensive, intuitive, and fluid control interface. So what’s the solution? We can only hope that at some point in the future iOS becomes a genuinely multi-tasking operating system and developers can enable their app to call other iPad apps on the same device and then be able to exit back to the original calling app. This way, we can use all those terrific apps (Sonos, etc.) from a single interface. given my limited knowledge of this development platform and its capability, I am far from certain if this is achievable. This is one way which I think this might work, although if any individual can think of alternative methods or solutions, then…
There is also support for web/IP based CCTV cameras. I have not tried this as I have no safety cameras operating in my current residence. In fact any url address (internal or external) can be used with an embedded web browser with full control over its display size.
Graphics & customisation – Graphics for buttons and background images are selected and positioned in the iRule builder application. There is a reasonably large and detailed selection of stock images which can be browsed in the builder. These are presented in “libraries” which is the term for a group of images. once you find a library which you wish to use in your panels, you select to have it displayed in a tree layout under the images tab on the builder. You can also design your own graphics and publish them to the builder. These will then be available for use just like the stock libraries. If you wish to share your library with other users, you can choose to do so.
The graphics images used, need to be in .png files, which allows for transparency to be adjustable. Philips’ Pronto series also uses this format and these can be used by iRule. In my experience, the Photoshop layered format supplies the best platform for creating and altering button images. The layered technique allows the user to utilise the same button graphic for a series of buttons with variations based on their function. However, Adobe’s Photoshop is not a low-cost program and might just be overkill for basic touch-pad button design. There are lots of cheaper/free alternatives which do the job. I use a package called Serif photo which comes in a complimentary (but with ads) and paid version. It has a very beneficial one-click “export” function which allows you to scale and save a png or jpeg version of whatever Photoshop image you are working on. For example if you are building a numeric keypad, it’s a basic matter of changing digits in the text layer and exporting each button.
One of the features lots of people like on touch-screen remotes, are buttons for certain channel selection with each showing the network logo:
There is a complimentary software utility called CoPilot by GUIFX which, amongst other beneficial images tasks, allows batch task of logo graphics to your choice of blank button. This makes very light work of generating channel selection:
Support & future plans – The developers web site has a very good set of “how to..” and tutorials as well as lists of supported devices. This is updated frequently as and when new features and devices are added. Interactive support is supplied generally through a dedicated thread on the AVSfroum.com. While this is a departure from the regular dedicated forum adopte