X10Dispatch Features
:
- x10 Event Monitoring (either directly or using the included event server to broadcast/receive
this information over a TCP/IP network)
- Local Sounds on x10 events: by maintaining a list of triggers in x10dispatch, you
can tie individual wav files to an x10 command such as ’b2 On’. This can be
useful in diagnosing the effectiveness of your x10 environment. If you simply
wish the sounds to be used for ambient effects, you may apply a sound spam prevention
feature to supress the frequency at which these sounds may repeat.
- Supports ’Armed’ and ’Disarmed’ modes: this enables and disables the sending of
MSN messages and/or emails about x10 Trigger which fire. Each individual trigger
may also elect to ’Chime Only’ which means it is not to be considered to violate
the ’Arming’ if it fires, yet it may still play a sound. There is a pseudo
LED readout which shows the status x10dispatcher’s Armed state, Alert state, Alerts
Dispatched state, and others. If a trigger fires (which is not ’chime only’)
while the system is armed, an alert is generated. You may specify a delay
(10-300 seconds) for arming and disarming which will suppress and delay alerts within
that time frame. This allows you to arm before leaving and re-enter before
disarming and any triggers which fire will be suppressed. You may also arm
and disarm via RF remotes, simply create a trigger tied to that device code and
set the Alert Description to ’Arm’ or ’Disarm’. This will automatically arm
and disarm the system and neither will actually raise an alert. It is recommended
to use recvplc transport for these since the rf may repeat ’recvplc d2 On’. Completely
unrelated to arming/disarming, I have also added a feature to embed a countdown
timer into a trigger. Just add a trigger with an alert description in the format
of 'Countdown 15 wavfile.wav' and in fifteen minutes after the trigger is raised
it will play the wavefile 'wavefile.wav'. You can set this to any number of minutes
and any wav but it must begin with Countdown.
- MSN Messages and commands (optional): if the system armed and an alert is raised
(trigger fires), you may choose to notify a ’Trusted MSN Contact’ of these alerts
in real-time. You may also enable the remote commands so that the Trusted
Contact may interact with x10dispatcher by sending it MSN Messages. The remote
commands currently supported include:
- ’Help’ (displays a list of all commands)
- ’Stats’ displays statistical information such as system arm status, number of events
heard, number of triggers fired, number of alerts sent to msn/email.
- ’Arm’ and ’Disarm’: you may now arm and disarm the system via MSN messenger commands
(if this option is turned on).
- History: this will display the last 1500 characters of x10 activity (approximately
50 events). The program itself maintains about 16K (~500 commands), but MSN
sets a limit to how large messages can be, so 1500 it is for now.
- Clear History: this will clear the x10dispatcher event history.
- Cycle Service: this allows you to shutdown and restart the x10nets windows service
(if you are running Windows 2000 or XP). If for some reason the CM15a becomes
unresponsive, this may allow you to re-enable its functionality. This is most
experimental right now but there have been several instances where my macros stop
firing and this returned their responsiveness. Independently from this MSN
Command, x10dispatcher also checks whether this service is running when it starts
up and if it is not, it will start it itself. This may allow you to configure
rebooting situations and avoid running AHP to initialize driver/service (assuming
you autostart x10dispatcher).
- Eaves On/Off, tells x10dispatcher to begin caching and forwarding all x10 activity
(whether there is a trigger or not) at a throughtput of 1500chars per 30 seconds.
You will not see activity instantly but 30 second max response time is not bad.
The program will continue notifying you of activity until you use the 'eaves off'
command.
- Send Image1/Image2/Image3/Image4/WeatherImage: (See Image Panel feature below).
This feature tells x10dispatcher to send you the current picture in the specified
image slot. The image will be sent as a file transfer. File transfers
are more picky about firewalls/routers (even if you can use msn normally otherwise).
You have to set up port forwarding for port 6891 on your home firewall/router (if
you use one).
- Request IP: This feature allows you to find out what your home computer IP address
is. This can be useful if you are running servers at home. If you are
on a behind a firewall, you may choose to have x10 dispatcher look at one of many
web based ip checker webpages (one is provided by default) to determine programmatically
and forward that ip address to you. If behind firewall remember to forward
the ports your server programs are using.
- Webcheck weather: Allows real-time weather alert checking (see Weather Alerts below).
- Reset WebAlerts: (See WebAlert feature(s) below). Once a webalert fires, it will
be suppressed from firing again until webalerts are reset either from the user interface
or this remote command. Each webalerts remains active until it fires, it
is then dispatched and further supressed, and resetting webalerts is done as a single
action to all webalerts.
- Notes: The user interface contains a multiline text area in the notes tab.
This command will forward all text (limited to 1500 chars) of text which is contained
in that text field. This is mostly useful for sending links to yourself.
Use in conjunction with ’Add Notes’ feature below.
- Add Note <note text> : Allows you to add a line of text to the Notes
tab of the User Interface. Useful for ’sending home’ information like links,
while you are away.
- Email (optional): x10dispatcher supports sending emails/text messages when an alert
occurs. You provide the destination email address, the email subject header,
return address, smtp server, smtp username and password (if authorization is required).
Upon doing so and enabling this feature, the alerts will be passed on to email (in
addition to msn if that is configured). Email supports a Spam Prevention mechanism
in which you may place either a maximum total message limit, or limit the number
of emails allowed ’per-trigger’.
- Power Monitoring (optional) : Notebook and/or UPS users may use x10dispatchers ability
to detect changes in the power status (such as a power outage). This feature
will send MSN messages telling you that the power went out, keep you updated about
your battery charge % as it drains, and tell you when the power returns. You
may also configure a program to be launched when a power failure is detected as
well as a separate program to be launched when the power is returned. This
feature currently supports sending messages to MSN and Email. Email will only send
the first occurrences of poweroff and powerbackon.. to re-enable them you will need
to use either the MSN command 'Reset Poweralerts' or uncheck the disable poweralerts
from the main screen Options menu. You may now also choose to only alert MSN on
the poweroff and poweron events and you will not receive the battery level alerts
via msn.
- Weather WebAlert (Optional): if you reside in the United States, you can make use
of the Weather Alerts made possible by
http://www.weatherroom.com/
. Simply enable this feature, enter your zip code, select optional sound,
set the timer frequency, and elect whether the alert should be emailed (msn only
by default). x10dispatcher takes care of the behind the scenes web page retrieval
and parsing and determines if the alert to send (should one exist).
- Custom WebAlerts: Allows a rough web alerting mechanism, which can be relatively
reliable providing you are able to determine a simple string for which a match means
alert and no match means no alert. For more information see detailed help
here.
- Image Panel (optional): If this feature is enabled, the lower portion of the main
screen will have two or four picture boxes displayed. You may choose which
images (either files on you local hard drive or urls to images on the Internet).
You may also specify a refresh interval for which they are to be reloaded.
This can be used in conjunction with (and separately from) cameras which support
still image capturing at intervals of its own. If your camera software can
dump the image to the hard drive or Internet, x10dispatcher will pick it up from
there and display integrated into its hud-like ui. These images are resized
for preview on main screen, but you may choose to bring up full size image for closer
inspection. There is now support for the AHP iWitness camera plugin's
autostills feature. You specify the base directory where autostills keeps its files
and x10dispatch will try to figure out the latest image generated for a camera you
filter on (like '*Kitchen Wide Eye.jpg'). No matter where the images come from,
you may request these images be sent to the MSN trusted user using the MSN command
'SendImage' (see help on that command above). You may also associate any of the
4 images with any of your triggers and tell x10dispatcher to email the image when
the trigger fires (while armed) or send msn message indicating how to retrieve that
image. For any of the trigger based image features, x10dispatch will refresh the
image at the time the trigger fires. If you do not own any cameras, you could still
use this area to display up to date weather images and forecasts, should you be
able to find the urls of those from local or national weather web sites.
I will try to keep this feature set updated but it may reflect old information.
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