The UPnP gateway now gets to a point that might even justify a pre-release, finally! It can be started from a batch file and configured to run one or more drivers. Capable of publishing dozens of UPnP devices simultaneously (be it as sub-devices)
A driver template is included so new drivers can quickly be setup. A fully functional xplrfx driver is included as well as 3 demo drivers. All c code is now compiled for distribution, no more development/debug libraries required. Continue reading
So yesterday, I gave a talk on home automation at HackersNL in Utrecht, nice and friendly audience and plenty of new ideas.
I’ve uploaded the slideset, available here (downloaded 2003 times). Furthermore some additional comments and links;
For a start with UPnP there is a lot of documentation on the forum pages. But there is no real shortcut to UPnP, but here’s where to start
It was a fun evening, thanks for the invitation guys! If you have any questions or want some more info, just drop a message below.
It’s been a while, but some major additions have been made to the UPnP gateway engine. Previously the engine would parse xml description files to generate objects. Now it includes both an xml factory and a device factory that generate everything on the fly.
The code now includes a BinaryLight and a DimmableLight (both standardized DCPs), they are based on standardized services SwitchPower and Dimming (also included). Implementing a fully functional DimmableLight device now only takes 4 lines of code; Continue reading
Just posting this as I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so what did I fix since last post;
Today I finished the first working sample of the new UPnP gateway I’ve been working on, a major milestone! Stepped out of .NET and changed to platform independent code and libraries. Punished myself with hardcore C, multi-threading and multi-platform all at once, but it all seems to start working now.
Its a Lua scripting engine, glued to the pupnp library. Lua is a small, fast and very portable dynamic scripting language and pupnp is a portable UPnP library. This creates an engine that will run on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, or even embedded on a NAS or your wifi router), while at the same time allowing users/developers to write code in Lua. So it takes away the need to do all the complex stuff in hardcore C, threading, platforms, etc. The Lua scripts will simply run on all platforms, unmodified.
The last few days I spent some time fixing the .NET UPnP stack to be more resilient. The stack itself it pretty ok, but the problem is that you do not have control over all the other UPnP devices out there. If these are faulty and don’t play by the rules, you can either ignore them (what the UPnP stack did until now) or try and handle only those parts that are ok.
Supporting for the UPnP gateway showed that several devices would simply not show up. Some fiddling with other UPnP tools and the debug facilities showed that the devices had faulty description xml’s (bad UPnP implementations by their vendors). The cases were the Grace Digital tuner and the Vera home automation box (the Grace Digital has a firmware update, beta, available that fixes the issue)
I had to take a pretty steep dive into the code to fix all the undelying elements. What happened was that the code for parsing device and service xml’s only had exception handling on the highest level. This means that you get either all or nothing. Continue reading
Today I uploaded yet another update for the gateway and xPLGirder component. Mike C put it to the test and had a list findings, most are resolved now. Besides those bugfixes the component now also uses lua events (based on the component model) besides the regular Girder events. This should make it easier to develop lua code that works with the xPL component.
Here’s another update of the gateway and the xPLGirder component. It had a nasty (and hard to find) bug, which took me nearly a day to find and fix (fixing was actually 1 minute). There is also a functional update (to the xPLGirder plugin) that accompanies the bugfix; if for some reason the announcement of a UPnP device does not complete, this is now detected and any missing elements will be re-requested.
This post will try to explain how the UPnP devices can be controlled using Girder. By explaining some UPnP basics and at the same time create some example code to control a simple device. Continue reading
A few days ago I updated the gateway (I even gave it its own page now) and the xPLGirder component (the only client for the gateway so far). On the Girder forum there are now some users experimenting with it and it seems to be working pretty well. It already outperformed an IR controller 🙂
Great to see it finally comes to a use beyond just me!
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