Anyway to report timer in MainLobby

simonmason · #1 November 5th, 2009, 12:11 AM

I have a timer that I would like to show on my MainLobby scene counting down. Is this possible? Thanks.

Krumpy · #2 November 5th, 2009, 08:30 PM

What timer?

simonmason · #3 November 5th, 2009, 09:08 PM

A delayed start to an event in Homeseer. I have a routine that I trigger that counts down 10 minutes before putting the house to sleep. It is just a device that is turned on with a delay of 10 minutes. I was thinking of showing this number countdown but I don't know how to access the timer - I think it is internal to HomeSeer. It occurs to me that I could simply trigger a timer in MainLobby - I imagine that is possible although I haven't actually tried it before.

simonmason · #4 November 6th, 2009, 08:08 AM

I looked into this and decided to use a MainLobby Countdown timer. I just start this from homeseer when the Homeseer timer is started. This works nicely and I can now display the minutes and seconds counting down on the MainLobby screen.

Krumpy · #5 November 6th, 2009, 08:02 PM

That's why I asked what timer... Not sure if you were using the MLServer timer. I of course would have done that in HS. But you are correct, that no single solution to do a timer and a count down clock currently exists within HS.

This could be written of course within a HS plugin or script.

Sounds like you already have a solution so unless many more people out there have the same issue, then we will leave things as they are.

Somewhat off subject, but I would highly recommend that you think about your architecture. With that I mean, where is your processing done? My suggestion is to pick a primary HA system and put all of the logic there. Doing a distributed model can, and likely will, make things alot more complex.

I personally place all of the control logic within HomeSeer and use Mainlobby/Mainlobby server primarily for the visual user interface. I use HomeSeer as it is more robust and multithreaded.

MLServer to this date is not truely multithreaded. Yeah, there are attempts to offload some of the heavy lifting into MLWorker but it is not multithreaded.

Each has it's advantages and disadvantages...

simonmason · #6 November 8th, 2009, 12:09 PM

My architecture is relatively simple. I use homeseer for about 95% of the logic. I only use MainLobby for stuff I can't do in homeseer. However the ML scripting support is clumsy - I assume most people do it through Macros - so I found this very limiting and soon gave up. I still run some of my low-level processing through my RCS CommStar - sprinklers, etc.