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Change front panel brightness via automation script

AlienW

Well-known member
My k server and vault are in a rack at the back of my media room. I found that even with the front panel LEDs set to 4, the blue glow was distracting while watching a movie when the scene was very dark. To fix this, I made a linux shell script so my openhab home automation controller could turn the lights on the k off when the room lights went off and back on when the movie was over.

I did this by using the 'wget' command line http client to connect to the k's web interface and update the configuration settings. To use the script, you will need 'wget' available on your path and you will need to update the configuration variables in the script for your k's server IP address and serial numbers.

then call the script like this:
./k_lights.sh N
where N is a number from 0 to 14 to indicate the desired brightness

Now I should also mention the normal disclaimers that there is no warranty for this code. And I am not responsible for anything that happens from using it. So there.
 

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  • k_lights.sh.txt
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A clever solution.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and opinions about using openHAB to control your theatre. What hardware are you running it on? What are you using as your controller?

Seriously considering rolling my own home control system and openHAB is looking interesting.
 
I am running openHAB for my home automation on a raspberry pi 2. I use zwave for lighting, an envisalink ethernet board to connect my alarm panel, a home-made ir receiver and transmitter connected to the GPIO, and a couple of usb to serial adapters.

For the theater, I mainly just use a learning IR remote control configured for all of my components as the controller. The remote has a couple of special ir codes programmed that the openhab receives and then triggers individual rules. For example there is one big rule that sets what source is selected in the theater. So when I press the button for the Blu ray player, openhab sends the appropriate signal to all connected components. It switches the projector to HDMI1 (via usb to serial adapter), switches the receiver to a certain input (via an infrared transmitter) and turns on the Blu ray player (also via usb to serial adapter) if it is not already on.

I have a 'watch movie' lighting scene/rule on another button that dims all the lights and sets the under cabinet lights in the adjoining snack area to 25%. When the movie is over, I press another button for the 'movie over' scene/rule that turns on just the lights by the stairs and puts the snack area lights back to 100%. Once I got the k talking to openhab, it sends a MOVIE_LOCATION message that indicates that the credits are rolling which will now trigger the 'movie over' lighting scene automatically.

So while there was a learning curve to figure out how to use it, I really like the flexibility that openhab allows. Once I got it configured, it is very reliable and needs a minimum amount of reboots and manual intervention. I hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions.
 
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