It didn't give me the null error and I was able to synchronize. However, the polling doesn't seem to be working, as my Caseta lights aren't showing up as on (they were before). I also don't have the "log" device. I do have the lastPoll device. I made sure I had the latest code.
By the way, thanks for making this happen. I've only just begun to get into Home Remote but I'm really liking it.
I take that all back. It's working now. I had gotten the script code about 40 minutes ago, so I went and got it again and pasted it into the Home Remote script area. Now everything is working! It's polling correctly for my lights and thermostat and I see the log device.
Bravo!
Excellent! I was reading your last post saying lights weren't updating and I had no clue and was going to have to refer to a higher power (Bill @ Home Remote). I have asked him to take a look at what I did to see if there is some way it could be better implemented, but I'm happy to hear it is working as is. And happy to hear someone else is successfully using Home Remote with Hubitat.
Have you figured out how to use the new device templates? I'm currently trying to get my thermostat to plug in with the thermostat template but can't quite figure out how the system knows what my thermostat is. From what I can gather, the idea is that you use @ and generic names - like @device or @thermostat. What I don't understand is how Home Remote knows what device or thermostat I'm referring to. There must be some sort of linking mechanism in Home Remote but I'm not seeing it.
Here's what my design is so far. Went with a basic floorplan I made in GIMP, then dropped the opacity down so it's more grey than white. Figured out you can use "appearance" and change the foreground color to yellow for the on state so that the icons turn yellow when they are on. I'm not sure if this is going to be the "is anything still on" screen or the "non-me people use this" screen. Maybe both. I'm kicking around the idea of having a picture of the house be the starting point, and then tapping on a room would zoom in on it.
I got a Harmony Hub that can turn on my stereo and TV, which I have hooked up thru a media center PC. I usually have to leave it all setup for when a family member or baby sitter comes over, since it's a bit too much for most people to do. I good watch TV page on Home Remote might solve it all though. I've done a little bit of work getting the harmony hub setup and I can get the powerOn command to work, but for some reason can't get the powerOff command to work (nor get the icon to go back to white once it goes yellow). Weird.
That is partially my fault. I don't use the built in device templates - nothing against them, but I prefer to make my own controls. Which built in template is used per device is decided by the plugin code - a capability comes from Hubitat, which the plugin code then determines which template to use. As I don't use the templates, I haven't really experimented much. I made it work for lights and switches just to prove they work... Let me see if I can update it to use a thermostat as well.
If you want to play with it - in the plugin script check out the if / thens under the OnSynchronizeDevices function.
You could also manually assign a template under the settings for the device - but they will reset when you resync your hubitat devices.
Don't worry about it too much. I've found it's pretty easy to copy the template over and then just manually change the states to match up to the actual device. Probably best to do it that way - I'll learn some tricks as I figure out what the setup is.
I like it! And I know from designing my own that this didn't just happen with a few mouse clicks - you've spent significant time personalizing. It looks great!
Regarding the "is anything still on" screen, I went a different - but not necessarily better - route. As you probably saw, my latest layout is LCARS and this is how I see the whole house status at once. Each section is basically a button... so if you see the kitchen lights are still on you click on the kitchen area and it brings you to the screen where you can control the kitchen functions.
Like I said - not better, but another option!
That's pretty impressive! Have you loaded it on a tablet? I was able to load up Home Remote on an old Kindle Fire and it worked just fine. I'm thinking about trying to mount a few of them around my house. Be a nice way to make use of some old tablets.
You ever heard of a smart mirror or magic mirror? If not, here's a picture I grabbed off the internet. I don't know if people have figured out how to get touch controls to work with one, but if so, Home Remote would work well for this.
I do have it on a tablet. I haven't shared my actual install before, because while I'm proud of the dashboard design I've created, the install itself is horrible as compared to what I've seen other people on these forums do! Its stuffed between the fridge and the door held up with mirror hangers. The only reason you can't see the power cord is because it is fed behind the fridge... Someday I'll have it recessed, possibly in a frame, with power fed from behind.... but not today.
The mirror idea is very cool - I'd much rather have the dashboard hidden in a functional device versus a tablet on the wall. If at all possible, I prefer the tech in my house to not be seen.
Regarding mounting old tablets in multiple rooms around the house... I expressed this in another thread, but my personal opinion is that a dashboard is great and you should have one - but you should use it as little as possible. It's a poor means of control versus voice control or having things happen automatically with motion... Its even worse than the traditional wall switch. But, it is great if you want to get a look at whats going on in the whole house. Or if you need to control another room from the room you are in. I originally put an old cell phone up on the wall in each room running a dashboard... and it was overkill - waste of time and electricity to keep them charged. Plus keeping them on and charging all the time (at that time I also had the cameras running) caused the batteries to bulge. So, I'm down to two. One by the main entry and one in the master bedroom. Those are the places I'm most likely to want to get a whole house view / check house status.
I just updated both the Home Remote plugin script and the Hubitat app on GitHub. Let me know if I broke anything!
If you add a thermostat heatingsetpoint / coolingsetpoint device it should now automatically assign it to the built in theremostat template after you re-sync the Hubitat devices.
Also, I didn't realize I had broken the use of the built in templates. I stopped sending device capabilities from Hubitat to Home Remote because I was only using attributes. Turns out, the built in templates need capabilities. So, that is now being sent again from Hubitat to Home Remote. The only downfall that I don't currently have a fix for is each device attribute will show up twice in dropdown lists. I don't think there is any issue with this, just an annoyance that the lists are now longer. Doesn't matter which of the dups you choose.
I couldn’t find anything useful here... it’s a single page website with some download links and a link to a rather antiquated forum, that does contain a lot of useful posts if you can navigate it.
All in all my experience is much the same as others.., very powerful but very non intuitive and the inbuilt help is very sparse with mostly broken links and missing topics. Very frustrating. Try searching for tiles or templates for example.
I do understand the end results can be rewarding but what a labour of love. Definitely needs documentation and a drag and drop interface overhaul.
BTW For those working through post 1 and trying it out... To get the tiles to display you have to click the device browser object and then draw its position on a page. That step is not clear as Andy manually creates controls.
Quick Q Andy.. once you create a set of controls for a device that you like I assume you can then create a template from that and thus have custom tiles .. is that easy ?
Can't argue with either of those statements. I really like having a customized dashboard - I'm not a huge fan of tiles. But you are also correct - it didn't happen in a night... or even a week... I don't even want to try to count the hours I have into it.
But, every time I came up with some other thing I wanted the program to do, I was excited to learn it could do it.... Such as the page I have that lets you dynamically change and save the interface colors from within the running dashboard - that took a couple nights to implement. Some of that time was on the Hubitat side to create devices to store the color codes, and some on the dashboard side to use those codes. Once you've figured something out obviously the second time is quick. But the first time takes time & research.
Not trying to put the product down, as you can tell by my posts I'm a huge fan... but I definitely don't want anyone to think there won't be a significant time investment for customized actions / a customized look.
I probably should have posted a link directly to the forum versus the homepage, I'll edit the first post. Also in the forum, one of the stickies brings you to a series of videos on youtube to get you started customizing a dashboard. I think they were created by a user. I haven't seen them all, just a couple when I first got started... but for anyone reading this who thinks you'll have a custom dashboard in 2 hours, be forewarned there is 2 hours of instructional content alone in that new user YouTube channel.
True! But to clarify (If the code is working correctly), as soon as you add some lights / thermostats / switches from Hubitat and correctly get it synced, you should be able to just hit play on the simulator and those devices should show up and be functional. You could stop there with a working dashboard, but it won't be customized at all. When you start designing yourself and you want to use a tile (versus building your own controls), as Kevin states you'll need to add your own Device Browser Object.
Very true. This product is still under development. But to be fair, so are most of the products / software we (members of this forum) use. Even Hubitat. Most pages in the Hubitat Interface have no help link at all, and the pages that do are far from complete. While I love Hubitat, I wouldn't suggest it to a family member as a plug and play solution. If I didn't install it for them, they would probably toss the thing after I told them to spend the night researching forums for the difference between a rule, trigger, triggered rule, and action. We are a special breed that enjoy (or at least tolerate) doing our own research.
The help resources are (1) 50% (maybe) of the time the built in help is useful. (2) the forum (including the youtube videos) and (3) Bill, the developer, is very responsive. He is on the forum and also provides e-mail support.
While currently very (if not fully) functional, it's not a finished product. From what I've seen, Bill works on and improves Home Remote daily. He has stated a more drag and drop solution is in the works, but no timeframe that I know of. But that's why most of us are playing with Hubitat in the first place - to try out new features, be the first to work with new home automation products, and come up with ingenious ways to use them and get them all talking to each other.
People on these forums spend weeks/months developing custom code to perform some task - as a hobby, for the challenge/fun, and the hope it will be a net plus for the community. I'm no programmer, so spending a few weeks researching and creating my own dashboards was fun for me. And I ended up with something functional. Hopefully other people will enjoy it as well.
I honestly haven't used the tiles - but it looks like you could easily create or modify one.
The way I did it was create a control exactly how I wanted it, then copied and pasted it. You then of course need to reassign which device it is controlling and relabel it.
I did try something different in the LCARS project. The light controls you see on the right (the color circle, level slider, on / off, and color temp) are all actually linked to a virtual device. That virtual device is mapped to whichever light I select to the left (Shown by the border around the selected light). So I only created the controls once, but what they are mapped to changes upon selection of a device. Similar to a template. I can get into more specifics / give an example if it is helpful.
If you want to take a look at my LCARS project to check out how I used mapping, Bill has posted the project file on his Home Remote website (I couldn't post it here). http://thehomeremote.com/downloads/examples/LCARS.hrp
Ahh. That didn’t work for me which is why I eventually ended up at device browser. Maybe it’s because I already had a couple of pages in situ when I added the Hubitat devices (which all synced fine) just no tiles visible.
Hard to say - but maybe that was the problem.
For someone starting from scratch - there are built in pages, icons, & templates when you first install the designer. If you don't change any of that and just sync up with Hubitat, certain devices (right now mainly switches, lights, contact sensors, and thermostats) will automatically be ready to go with the built in tiles. You can't see them until you start the simulator. My guess as to why you can't see them in the designer is the device browser object is likely set to expand to the number of available devices... For example, one of the pages has a device browser filtered to show all lights. So it is basically null until you start the simulator and then the program filters how many lights devices are available and expands to accomodate.
This is a repost of a previous image I shared. I didn't customize any of this. This is what should happen (without having to design anything) immediately after syncing some lights with hubitat. In the example, I had 4 lights synced.
Bill from Home Remote read our posts and wanted us to know there was a second way to use Templates besides a Device Browser control.
From my understanding, the Device Browser control lets you specify what Device Types you want it to show and it will create a separate tile for each device using the template specified in the device's settings. Such as, show a tile for each Light in the Living Room.
The Page Browser control lets you specify a specific device and template. Such as, show me the Living Room Overhead Light using the Light Template #2.
His e-mail below:
I noticed there were a few questions regarding templates & how they work. I wanted to point out that there are actually 2 ways to use that feature.
#1 - Using the DeviceBrowser control along with a Device's TileTemplate & DetailsTemplate.
#2 - Using the PageBrowser control. This has no dependency on a Device's TileTemplate & DetailsTemplate. Instead, you control its content through the control's "Device" & "Page" properties.
Templates for both of these scenarios work the same. Instead of using specific device variables in your XAML template, use the @Device prefix. I wasn't sure if you were aware about the 2nd option, so just thought I'd mention that.
@AndyM I'm working with this and cannot load the .hrp into my android device. I also see no way to get the PRO version? Any help will be appreciated.
** Update I have figured it out... So far so good...
Glad you got it working!
If you keep tinkering with your hrp file (like I do), manually reloading it to the android device each time can be a bit of a hassle. Bill put in a solution for that though - the easiest way to get the hrp into the android device is to set up the ftp feature.
I can give more details - but basically you need an ftp server (I just stuck a USB stick in a wireless router), then you save the ftp settings into the hrp file. The first time you have to manually load that hrp onto the android device. From then on, each time you start the android app it checks the server for a new version and installs it. You can also create a button to force the app to reload itself without manually closing it from android.
@AndyM I'm using Google Drive to transfer. Works easily. I am very interested in your LCARS setup. I downloaded the version that is posted but haven't dove in yet. I need to figure out all the extra datastores that I need to create. Also I'm worried about the sync devices.... If it deletes all that you have does that break all of the logic or do they reconnect based off of name?
Download the Hubitat app
