Jay and Matt,

Will you be adding support for the iMeter, Smarthome item # 2423A1 ?

Assuming the answer is "yes," what information will Indigo be able to harvest from it, display, and pass into variables?

Is this just a smarter version of the Synchrolinc? (Item 2423A5)

Thanks,
MJC

Since we are concentrating on major feature development of Indigo 5 now, we won't be adding support for the iMeter to Indigo 4. We'll still add new INSTEON hardware support to v4 as long as it fits one of the current device profiles (dimmers, relays, etc.), but supporting the iMeter correctly is going to require quite a bit of development work and thus will be in the next major release (which is still months away from a public beta).

Hmm... That's rather disappointing.

Couldn't basic support code be back-ported from the current Indigo 5 build? At least enough so that data can be manually read from the device (perhaps by a Time/Date Action)? Or perhaps a similar polling mechanism to that of the Venstar HVAC thermostats? If code to do this will exist in Indigo 5, restricting this device compatibility only to Indigo 5 (perhaps as an upgrade incentive) is understandable, but of no help to those of us who wish to use the device sooner than the Indigo 5 release schedule permits. Toss us a bone Matt and Jay?

--Nathan

The current Indigo 5 builds don't have it either - we're working on other higher priority things. However, even if it did, it isn't that simple (to back port) or we would do it. As Matt points out, there are going to be non-trivial changes to support it.

At this point, no single addition larger than a couple of hours (development/test time) is going into Indigo 4. Of course, we'll continue to fix bugs. And we'll continue to add support (for the foreseeable future) for the majority of new devices coming out of Smartlabs since they generally follow the pattern of existing device types.

Hello.

I just added a Imeter Solo to my system, works great but I need a way of reset the total/total time on a daily basis.

Anybody have a sugestion? thanks

arskrett wrote:Hello.

I just added a Imeter Solo to my system, works great but I need a way of reset the total/total time on a daily basis.

Anybody have a sugestion? thanks

I'm away from home at the moment, but I assume that Applescript (don't know Python, but planning to learn that, too) can do it; I got a pair of them for washer and dryer monitoring and planned to write a script to log and clear them on the first of every month this weekend; if somebody doesn't do it sooner, I'll post what I find when I get around to it.

Currently there isn't a good way to do this (an AppleScript that sends the raw command might work, but I'm not positive). It is already on our feature request list, but I'll see if I can bump up its priority since it is pretty essential...

support wrote:Currently there isn't a good way to do this (an AppleScript that sends the raw command might work, but I'm not positive). It is already on our feature request list, but I'll see if I can bump up its priority since it is pretty essential...

No joy on the Applescript unless I am not using the right property name; when I try to assign it to a variable, I get


Error script error: Can’t get "Total Usage(kWh)" of "Washer Started". Access not allowed. (-1723)

whether I use the (kWh) or not. So do I have to use the
"item 1 of accumEnergyTotals" method? And can I do a reset by setting the item?

Well, I went to the Wiki, and there it flatly states that none of the energy totals in the Imeter are available to applescript, and it gives an example of how to do exactly what I want to do in Python... the only thing is that it appears that the device MUST be accessed by "ID" in Python; a few functions like turn on and turnoff allow ID or Name, but, getting the specific instance doesn't seem to be one of them. So, where and how can I obtain the ID for device "Washer Started" in the Indigo UI? Is it the "Device ID" in the dialog (I only ask because all the python examples have values like 75 and 123[which looks suspiciously like an index into an array], while on my server, all the device IDs are 10 digits long...).

Update: Yes, the big number is the ID; and you can get it by right clicking on the device and selecting "Copy ID" from the sub menu. Using an imbedded python script (Indigo5 b8) in a schedule, I logged the accumulated totals and reset the device; The Wiki

iMeter Wiki

shows how to do it; just replace the 123 with the device ID from your indigo list.

The use of IDs in the IOM (Python scripting) is discussed in several places in the documentation including the IOM Introduction, which everyone should read before trying to script Indigo with Python. Right-clicking is the easiest way to get the ID of an object but it's also visible as one of the available columns in the various tables in the UI. The use of the object name, while somewhat convenient, is highly discouraged - if you ever change the name of your device, all scripts that refer to it by name will stop working.

jay wrote: The use of the object name, while somewhat convenient, is highly discouraged - if you ever change the name of your device, all scripts that refer to it by name will stop working.

Yes, I've been down that road before; but it is something of a two edged sword. Unless you are very scrupulous about commenting (and I've become more and more so over the years, not with Python, but with other control software), you can waste a whole bunch of time trying to figure out why six months ago you (or worse somebody else working on the same system) stuck in code that says turn off device id 1234567 when device 135679 begins drawing more than 200 watts... until you search them out and find out that one is the dishwasher and the other a 1400 watt bathroom heater that REALLY should have been on a different breaker ...

I wish Python had inline comments so that when you copy the device ID from the main window (via right-click) we could put it on the clipboard like this:

Code: Select all

1234 /* Office Lamp */

but unfortunately all Python comments are terminated by EOL.

And note that, despite our preference that users use IDs instead of names, name strings do work in most cases:

Code: Select all

indigo.sensor.resetAccumEnergyTotals("garage refrigerator")

matt (support) wrote:I wish Python had inline comments so that when you copy the device ID from the main window (via right-click) we could put it on the clipboard like this:

Code: Select all

1234 /* Office Lamp */

but unfortunately all Python comments are terminated by EOL.

I believe it is syntactically correct in Python to write:

Code: Select all

1234 # Office Lamp

What I want, but python doesn't have, is an inline comment though so that when the user right-clicks in the UI to copy a device/var/etc ID we can also have the name in a comment that will be useful to directly paste into a script like:

Code: Select all

dev = indigo.devices[1234 /* office lamp */]

What I want, but python doesn't have, is an inline comment though so that when the user right-clicks in the UI to copy a device/var/etc ID we can also have the name in a comment that will be useful to directly paste into a script like: ...

Depending on how cheesy you're willing to get, you could use something like this:

Code: Select all

(123456, "Kitchen Counter Outlet")[0]

The more ambitious approach would be to copy and paste something like

Code: Select all

indigo.device(123456, "Kitchen Counter Outlet")

with a suitable device method in the indigo namespace (and similar things for the other IOM types - after all, you know what you're copying) to directly denote the IOM object. Anyone who wants just the number can just append .id to that.

Cheers
-- perry