Folks, today I am releasing FIRST to the Hubitat community a major upgrade to HousePanel. This version includes a completely new installation module that will ease the process of installing and configuring HP for new users. You can grab all the files in the usual place on GitHub under the OpenDash account. This update is in the "editpage" branch because I am still fiddling with it a bit, but I wanted to post it now so people can start using it and providing feedback. (the link below will take you to that branch).
Follow the directions in the Wiki on that GitHub page to install. First upload all the server stuff to your url - typically on a rPI. Make note of the url to use in the Hubitat installation. Then on the Hubitat side install the App. You will see a page that looks like this.
If you do not have a ST hub, be sure to check the Hubitat Only checkbox. If you want to access HP through the cloud, select that option... but I don't recommend it. Once you save the App it will send your configuration over to your website and it will configure itself. For this to work you must have the files installed at the HousePanel url location provided as shown.
Then launch your browser and navigate to this page. If you are new, you won't have the config file so you will see this page:
The blahblahblah line will be automatically populated by your Hubitat App access token, and the IP and endpoints will be auto populated from the step above. If you are using ST in parallel, you must copy the client_id and client_secret values from your ST OAUTH page here. Note that HP no longer uses the clientinfo.php file to store these values. They must only be provided here. You also have the option of providing a pre-authenticated fixed token and endpoint as before here.
Once you hit the Authorize HousePanel button you will then see your panel. It should have a default setup but you can customize it as always as much as you like.
For a new install, you still have to go in and change the hmoptions.cfg file to 666 using chmod if you want to use the GUI editor or the Options page. Still investigating a fix...
If you are happy with your setup there isn't much need to upgrade to this version. The next revision will have the Page Editor finalized so you might want to wait for that. If you do upgrade, be sure to keep a copy of your old hmoptions.cfg file just in case.
Not played with HousePanel yet but plan to give it a go over the weekend and hopefully further reduce my reliance on smart things ...
A few questions ..
Can I achieve a similar “clean look” to action tiles ?
I have several cameras that I download the last image from (jpg) and host on a raspberry Pi. And display on actiontiles, these refresh every 15 mins.. can I achieve a similar set up with home panel ?
Yes and more. Everything on screen in HP is controlled by a CSS file that you can edit to make look however you like. An ActionTiles clone is easily accomplished and several users have done that.
Cameras and video are supported with some effort using frame tiles. The ST thread has examples.
I do exactly this same thing for HP. My camera saves a still photo every 5 minutes that HP reads into one of four provide image tiles. Video tiles also exist that take a mp4 file that can be saved using a similar technique. I do this with my Arlo cameras using a Python hack.
I attempted to do that but it had no effect, i used America/New_York ... but the tile continues to display GMT.
Edit: I tried again using all lower case, just to see ... and I notice it updated the file hmoptions.cfg.
Because of the forward slash in the timezone name, I see it is inserting a backslash escape character ... I kind of wonder if that could having an issue due me running on Windows? idk, was the only suspicious thing i could see. (shrug)
The backslash is a build in part of the web mechanism to write text when using urlencode so that should be fine since urldecode removes it on the read step. The default works fine for me and should for you too since Detroit and New York are in the same time zones. This might mean that your server insists on reporting time at the location of the server which is likely on the west coast. Let me look into how to override this.
I did some debugging and determined that the setting makes no difference. So this probably has to be set on your server side.
[EDIT] Found the problem. I was setting the timezone after I read the things which set the clock. Once I reversed the order all is good. Let me update the files in the Git Hub and you should be all set. Give me a few moments.
For me, it appeared to work ... but if i refreshed a few times or closed the tab and reopened it, the time was back to GMT again.
This may be an issue with my install (again I'm suspicious of the fact I'm running on Windows) ... this behavior of seeming to not save settings permanently is very similar to the next issue I was going to mention. In the options page, if I customize which switches are enabled in which rooms that also does not save. If I close/reopen or go back and forth a few times, it reverts, the kitchen and living room both have pretty much every box checked.
Suspecting permissions probs I gave the local "Everyone" group "Full Control" permissions to C:\Apache24\htdocs\housepanel ... but to no avail, not sure what else to do from there.
