Re: Newbie

[Kevin Hawkins <yahoogroupskh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dave, and welcome.

First of all apologies - this message seems to have eluded the
Yahoo moderation system and so sat sad and lonely over Xmas - I only
just saw it .

Your project sounds really interesting and I'm preferring ZigBee
over Z-Wave - in fact I have a couple of ZigBee devices but I am not
sure just at the moment if their implementation is standard.   There's
those 'Alert Me'  ZigBee power monitor plugs appearing soon too for
£25
and if they worked that would be great. .   Are you using the MaxStream
ZigBee modules - and if so which versions I wonder.   I had some earlier
ones but they didn't mesh well - I understand later ones whilst now able
to mesh are incompatible with those earlier ones.

Re the xAP plugin for HomeSeer - there are actually three , the mcs
ones being the most actively maintained.   Using xAP means you don't
need to write a HomeSeer plugin, and if you implement the xAP BSC (v1.3)
schema then the devices are automatically recognised and can just be
enabled in HomeSeer.  Indeed this also applies to any HA application
that has a xAP plugin - so automatically you would have support within
HomeSeer, HouseBot, MisterHouse, Premise (?), Charmed Quark, Cortex,
xLobby, xAP Floorplan, OPNMax etc as well as all other xAP
applications.    You can use other schema too with a lot of these
applications.   I don't know whether you intend to have some of your
boards available to others (I know I'd be interested) but it's nice to
get such a wide range of application support provided without writing
any of the plugins..

Do keep us posted and ask away with any questions you have.  There
are some forum posts on xAP v1.3 here and in the developer forum  (most
significant change being the UID field expansion) and , if you do
implement the BSC schema then this has some fairly obvious follow
through to the ID= field handling.

Cheers Kevin

Dave wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I just joined the group and wanted to say hi and tell you what I want
> to do with xAP.
>
> I have been using Homeseer for a number of years now and pleased with
> the way it works and stability etc.!!
>
> Anyway I want to build some hardware to control my aircon units using
> infra red and the boards I have designed have a Zigbee transmitter on
> each one. I then have a Zigbee to USB interface for the PC. I was
> considering the programming of a Homeseer plugin but 2 things lead me
> away from that. One is that the plugin must run on the Homeseer PC (at
> least it appears that way) and 2 is I have no idea how to write one in
> C as all the samples are in VB.
>
> So I looked around for a suitable interface to Homeseer. I was using
> Homeseer Commander from Gadget Junkie but this doesn't appear to be
> active anymore and it doesn't seem stable, for me at least, with HS2.
>
> I came across xAP having been on the UKHA group for a number of years
> and I am thinking it might be just what I am looking for. I can
> control and set my devices through it and it works over my home
> network so I can do all the development on a different PC with the
> benefits of fill single stepping debug etc. And I also found C code
> for it. Brilliant.!
>
> Now all I have to do is learn xAP and write some code to send and
> receice the messages and it should all just work!! Hope that is the
> theory behind it??? :o)
>
> Regards
> Dave...
>
>


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