Indigo

[baltz]

Does anyone on here have experience using Indigo home automation software with Kaleidescape?

I haven't had much of a chance to play with it, but it looks to be geared more towards Z-Wave, X10, and Insteon. Most A/V devices require a 3rd party plugin.

I have a mac mini, z stick for controlling z wave devices, and a few z wave dimmers. I can get the status of the dimmers, set brightness, etc. I also added a TiVo plugin and can control the TiVo from Indigo. I have the basics down, but I don't know where to start with Kscape. I can't find a plugin anywhere.

The first feature that I would like to get working would be to turn the lights on when the credits start rolling. I can use telnet to get movie location events (which is pretty amazing by the way), I just don't know how to get that into Indigo.

If anybody has any tips or a plugin that they would like to share, I would greatly appreciate it.

I would also consider using a different software-based controller. I am just on a free trial of Indigo now. I'm not interested in anything that would require a dealer, this is more just for fun. I have one-way URC remotes that I have programmed myself that work well enough, but I would be interested in adding a few extra features.

Thanks,
Adam

 

[djb_rh]

You just need the Cynical Network plugin. It and the Cynical Cache (for the Global Cache devices) seem like basic requirements that they should just include, but they don't.

But yeah, I use Indigo fine as my middle-man server between iRule and my devices. I do actually use a tiny bit of Indigo's web page control, but only as tiny widgets inside iRule pages, never as a complete page.

I have it working to let volume on the Kapp work, too. Works fine.


--Donnie

 

[baltz]

Well, that was easy! The Cynical Network plugin is just what I needed. I have successfully triggered lighting changes from Kaleidescape movie location information.

I don't have any Global Cache devices yet, but that plan on adding some. Based on the documentation of that plugin, it should work just as easily.

These two plugins should cover just about all of my needs. Thanks for the tip!

 

[djb_rh]

No problem.

I get the impression that the Indigo guys wrote Indigo to support the things they needed first, and then quickly the Cynical guy wrote those plugins and has since been an awesome maintainer and contributor to Indigo, so they've left things as-is even though almost nobody needs Indigo without one of his plugins.

They really should integrate those better...at least Network, because it's entirely non-obvious that you should go checking for third party stuff for something so basic.

The only problem I've had lately is my system seems to lose connected state occasionally to ALL plugin devices. And I can't find a way to disconnect and reconnect them ALL at one time. I have to click each one, uncheck the box, check the box, and they come right back. It's VERY odd. I think it's a weird network problem up the line that's triggering it, but it's still odd that it won't recover any better than this.

I use the Network plugin to control my Digital Projection projector, too. It's got a funny little telnet protocol. But works fine. The K protocol is pretty awesome, as you've found, and is easy to work with, too.


--Donnie

 

[JoshATX]

I'm a big irule user and messed with Indigo for a bit, man does it seem clunky compared to setting up iRule.

I didn't get very far with Indigo at all, to be fair I didn't invest that much time into it. I have a couple weeks off coming up that I may devote more time. Any tips on dealing with it? iRule is very straight forward to me, creating new devices, feedbacks, etc. are all things I've done repeatedly (I often find I need to add commands that don't exist in the irule supplied device profiles). Again all very easy because their UI is pretty straight forward.

Indigo seemingly is a nightmare on the UI front. I was hoping for effectively iRule but as a perpetually live server vs. discretely running instances on each "controller". After two hours with Indigo it almost seemed to me that I'd be better off writing my own custom server in PHP or something of that ilk than rolling around in the mud with Indigo.

Am I missing something?

 

[djb_rh]

You aren't really missing anything, no.

I don't love the iRule interface, but it is better thought out than the Indigo one, that's true.

iRule is a lot better as a tool for creating your control. Indigo, IMHO, is really only useful as the glue to then let you do things that you simply can't do with iRule because you NEED perpetual state. That said, we did find it easier to use a combination of iRule and Indigo for a few interface things. Power state on some devices is a case where we used Indigo to control the devices and used web panes within iRule to display Indigo's web buttons for them. Back when we did this there was NO feedback in iRule yet, so it was the only way to have buttons that changed state according to power status. And it was easy.

Now the only thing I "need" Indigo for is probably as the K middle-man server to talk to the TCP interface. I don't think there's any way to let iRule do that since some comm could happen while iRule is "asleep." (Ie. there's no way to use iRule as the service that lets the Kapp control system volume while you're in that app and not iRule.)

But yeah, I would have gone out of my mind trying to build full control screens in Indigo. iRule is way better for that.

Simple Control is getting pretty good for all this, too. The interface is less configurable, but it's EASY to setup. Their agent may one day be able to be the K middleman server as well, which would be really cool. But they have the state thing between devices down pretty nicely, which is WAY cool (and not something iRule can do at all, as far as I know). By that I mean you can walk in a room and start controlling a system on your phone, and your wife can walk in and open up her iPad and it warps right in to the proper control screen for how the system is running now...a very neat trick.


--Donnie

 

[JoshATX]

I wasn't even thinking about interface building, the device comms set up seems super clunky in Indigo. What I really wanted to was not build any UI at all in Indigo but set it up as a persistent layer that I could just read feedbacks from. iRule sucks mightily at processing text so it would also allow me to do things like format out escape characters, etc on the persistent middle tier and just have iRule read exactly what I want displayed from it.

I just found the whole thing difficult to navigate and sort out. Coding up something to act as a middle tier for some specific devices isn't trivial but it isn't rocket science either. Kind of surprising there isn't something more available to the DIY segment that can do this. Control4 doesn't interest me as it's too limited and dealer restricted. Crestron would do what I'd like but is crazy expensive.

 

[djb_rh]

Agreed on all counts. FWIW, I replaced an EXTENSIVE Crestron system with Indigo and iRule (also scaled it back a lot because I just didn't NEED everything the Crestron stuff could do). Crestron is also dealer restricted now, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

And yeah, I've often thought someone should just start coding a middle-man layer to run on Linux and then people could do some really cool things with a simple Pi. The problem is it's so ill-defined...what you want, or what you want FIRST, isn't likely to jive with a huge group. Hard to get any traction in the open source world on very open ended projects like this. I mean if you could do it all yourself it wouldn't matter, but until someone comes along who CAN and WILL do enough to get a good base others can use, we'll continue to flounder with mediocre stuff.

If someone like Simple Remote could add some powerful scripting language to their Sync server, I think that would be a great first commercial step, anyway.


--Donnie