That is something we are considering.

Sorry, but because of evolving priorities, we don't publish release timelines.

All,

I've been following this particular topic for the last 6 months to a year and I'm amazed at how sophisticated the control pages are getting. In particular, I really like dewter35 and gtreece's control pages (latest that have been posted). I've got a couple questions as I'm starting to put together a control page on my iPad.

1.) How are you all controlling iTunes playlist? I.e. choosing iTunes playlist from a control page to play.

2.) SImilar to the question above but how are you all choosing a specific radio station in iTunes?

3.) Has anyone done any work to add functionality for PandoraJam to their control page?

4.) Does anyone know how to reference the picture frame capability on the iPad? What I mean by this is I want to launch the picture frame app (on the main lock screen of iPad) from within indigo. For applications like remote and pandora you can launch them by referencing remote:// and pandora://, respectively.

5.) @gtreece: Where did you get your weather icons? I'm a meteorologist so I've got to have a weather control page . Sometime I've added is a refreshing page to the local radar...looks nice and a great additional feature.

Thanks in advance for anyone that has some answers to the questions above.

-David

trek4242 wrote:All,
1.) How are you all controlling iTunes playlist? I.e. choosing iTunes playlist from a control page to play.

I'm not, yet. I have been working on Sirius control, and basic iTunes start/stop playback. It will be a week or two before I dive into iTunes in more depth, to see what's possible.

trek4242 wrote:2.) SImilar to the question above but how are you all choosing a specific radio station in iTunes?

I'm controlling Sirius through Pulsar. I have Pulsar running on my Indigo Server, and am using Airfoil to distribute audio to zones (to Airport Express units). I'm using Pulsar's Applescript support to pull current playing track info, as well as channel control. Pulsar allows forward/back through presets, and I also discovered that individual channels are addressable through a URL, so I created a station panel, that has buttons for the stations we listen to. Clicking on a station icon tunes that station, and delivers you back to the audio control page. Using Airfoil allows me to easily distribute voice alerts from Indigo, and whatever audio apps I want to run. I'm using variables to track sources and all aspects of audio, and have the zones mapped to my control page so that I can turn them on and off as needed. I'm getting enough motion sensors in the house now, that I can probably start to move audio around the house with me automatically.

trek4242 wrote:3.) Has anyone done any work to add functionality for PandoraJam to their control page?

Not me. We listen to Sirius mostly, as well as our iTunes Library. I may tackle internet radio stations and other applications once Sirius and iTunes are in order. Any internet radio application that is scriptable should work fine, just as Pulsar does.

trek4242 wrote:4.) Does anyone know how to reference the picture frame capability on the iPad? What I mean by this is I want to launch the picture frame app (on the main lock screen of iPad) from within indigo. For applications like remote and pandora you can launch them by referencing remote:// and pandora://, respectively.

I am not aware of a method to do that, but it would be sweet if one exists!

trek4242 wrote:5.) @gtreece: Where did you get your weather icons? I'm a meteorologist so I've got to have a weather control page . Sometime I've added is a refreshing page to the local radar...looks nice and a great additional feature.

I am using the "Weather Icons for Weather Underground" from the user contributions library:
http://www.perceptiveautomation.com/fil ... php?id=130

I use a variety of plugins/scripts, all from these forums, some modified slightly, as well as my own weather station/WeatherSnoop data. As I mentioned to someone else, right now, I'm building out control pages that are intended as touch panel remote control units around the house, so the clean bright icons work well for a simple quick read of the weather. In addition to the control pages, Indigo speaks the short range forecast each morning, and also gives me voice and text alerts if the forecasted low is near or below freezing.

I have one apple script for iTunes and one apple script for loading a pandora station. I have one variable in indigo that I manually changed the variable to from within an action, the action also runs the script that loads the station/playlist. It works pretty good for my uses... The only thing I have to add if I add a station playlist is one indigo action group, and then add it to a control page if that's what I want to do with it... but the action group will work standing on its own.

I've not done much the iTunes radio stations, but I believe that if you add them to a playlist they should work just the same.

I use pandora's box (mac app store) which is scriptable, and plan to submit my scripts to the user contribution library once I get everything cleaned up and get time, but like the above was mentioned, any scriptable application should work. I guess the only thing you have to ask if it's worth $8 of your time to write all the scripts for that other application.

@gtreece: Thanks for all your previous comments/suggestions. This weekend I added a lot of new capabilities to my control pages. I was able to successfully create a weather control page except for one little formatting error. I've got all the variables in the correct place and everything is showing up on the page, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to parse the long lines of text to make them show up on two separate lines. For example, your sample image of your control page shows text for tonight and monday. What did you do in order to break the long string of conditions into two lines? Thanks in advance for your help.

-David

At the moment, David, I have a very brute force approach. I need to revisit it, either in python or applescript, to turn it into a cleaner subroutine. I started with the script found on one of the weather threads, that simply broke the larger forecast string into chunks of 45 characters (the 45 character limit worked in my case). From there, I wanted to shrink each 45 character chunk back, to the space closest the end of the chunk (to be sure I was ending the line at a word break). I then split there, and repeated the process on whatever was left of the original string.

If you take the case where the forecast is more than 45 characters long, but not more than 90, then I know there will be at least two shortened lines. Depending on the exact split, it is possible, that it could run into 3 lines. So I split at 45, then work backwards to the first space. That is my first line. If what is left is more than 45 characters, just repeat that process.

It's ugly, because I just typed all this out for each possible length of forecast, up to the length that would fill up 6 shorter lines.

Here's what the example looks like as I described above (more than 45 and less than 90 characters):

Code: Select all

if ((length of day1Period1Forecast is less than 91) and (length of day1Period1Forecast is greater than 45)) then
         set splitChar2 to 0
         set splitChar to 45
         set lastChar to "-"
         repeat until lastChar is equal to " "
            set lastChar to character splitChar of day1Period1Forecast
            set splitChar to splitChar - 1
         end repeat
         if ((length of day1Period1Forecast) - (splitChar + 2)) is greater than 45 then
            set splitChar2 to splitChar + 45
            set lastChar2 to "-"
            repeat until lastChar2 is equal to " "
               set lastChar2 to character splitChar2 of day1Period1Forecast
               set splitChar2 to splitChar2 - 1
            end repeat
         end if
         set value of variable "day1Period1Line1" to (characters 1 through splitChar of day1Period1Forecast) as string
         if splitChar2 is equal to 0 then
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line2" to (characters (splitChar + 2) through -1 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line3" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line4" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line5" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line6" to ""
         else
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line2" to (characters (splitChar + 2) through splitChar2 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line3" to (characters (splitChar2 + 2) through -1 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line4" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line5" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line6" to ""
         end if
      end if

So I have 6 of those blocks for the period 1 forecast, and 6 of those blocks for the period 2 forecast. The next block, for more than 90 but less than 136, looks like this:

Code: Select all

if ((length of day1Period1Forecast is greater than 90) and (length of day1Period1Forecast is less than 136)) then
         set splitChar3 to 0
         set splitChar to 45
         set lastChar to "-"
         repeat until lastChar is equal to " "
            set lastChar to character splitChar of day1Period1Forecast
            set splitChar to splitChar - 1
         end repeat
         set splitChar2 to splitChar + 45
         set lastChar2 to "-"
         repeat until lastChar2 is equal to " "
            set lastChar2 to character splitChar2 of day1Period1Forecast
            set splitChar2 to splitChar2 - 1
         end repeat
         if ((length of day1Period1Forecast) - (splitChar2 + 2)) is greater than 45 then
            set splitChar3 to splitChar2 + 45
            set lastChar3 to "-"
            repeat until lastChar3 is equal to " "
               set lastChar3 to character splitChar3 of day1Period1Forecast
               set splitChar3 to splitChar3 - 1
            end repeat
         end if
         set value of variable "day1Period1Line1" to (characters 1 through splitChar of day1Period1Forecast) as string
         set value of variable "day1Period1Line2" to (characters (splitChar + 2) through splitChar2 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
         if splitChar3 is equal to 0 then
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line3" to (characters (splitChar2 + 2) through -1 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line4" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line5" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line6" to ""
         else
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line3" to (characters (splitChar2 + 2) through splitChar3 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line4" to (characters (splitChar3 + 2) through -1 of day1Period1Forecast) as string
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line5" to ""
            set value of variable "day1Period1Line6" to ""
         end if
      end if

I'm pretty sure it will clean up well as a subroutine.

In applescript (and probably python), it would also be easy to split the long string into words. It was not immediately coming to me, whether it would be easier to split on words, then iterate through overall length, or to split on length, then iterate through to find the end of a word.

Wow, I just bought Indigo a month ago and am just starting to look into control pages. These are so much more then I expected to be able to do. Where does a newb start at learning how to make these and the scripting behind it?

Implementing Control Pages doesn't require any scripting above and beyond what non-CP functionality requires. I don't believe any scripts are used on my CPs any more.

Start with the Control Page editor documentation - that should give you the basics of creating them. You should be familiar with the various Actions that Indigo can perform - that's the real power of CPs. Once you're comfortable with creating them then check out the Control Page Design section of the wiki for further tips

Well, it's not much so far - but here goes, my current iPhone control pages:




I particularly like the home/away variable setting which uses the Find my iDevices plugin, and the 'Front Door Last Opened' which I populate with an Insteon relay.

Next up is indoor/outdoor temperature monitoring, together with logic to start a fan in the dog's room when the temperature gets above a certain point. I was thinking about getting an Ambient weather station for use with Weatherscoop but the Ambient seems like a bit of an overkill for just temp monitoring. Anyone have any suggestions for inexpensive weather sensor solution I could get for about 3 rooms of my house?

I'd also like to add a Weather Forecast page with a detailed 5-day forecast, but am not sure how to do that yet.

Adam

The RFXRec433 seems to be a solid device with a good plugin developed by the vendor. You can use a wide variety of sensors with it including some inexpensive temp sensors.

jay (support) wrote:The RFXRec433 seems to be a solid device with a good plugin developed by the vendor. You can use a wide variety of sensors with it including some inexpensive temp sensors.

Thanks, Jay. Ordered the RFXRec433 together with 3 sensors today! Also updated my control pages to have a 7 day weather forecast, have integrated the google voice SMS plugin, and created a new page to mark the countdown to a pending vacation to Bermuda (showing current weather conditions there, and a livestream from a Bermuda webcam). Next up is Sonos integration and Insteon -> IR control of my entertainment center.

The idea occurred to my yesterday that one could make a control page to record things like visits to the gym or other things one might want to track. Using the Indigo SQL plugin, I might log such events and use something to generate graphs to track activity over time. Outside the realm of home control, yes, but why not!

Adam

Interesting idea. Note, however, that the SQL Logger plugin isn't a generic SQL plugin. It's designed to log events and data generated directly from Indigo's known objects.

This has proven to be very useful. I have an X10 keypad in my office, for my work at home phone gig, that triggers a display with the time remaining for my break, or lunch, on
an always on screen in our living room. Haven't been late to get back yet. Thanks Indigo!

The second hand was completely unnecessary but fun to implement.

Carl

Jack_the_rat wrote:This is mine







feel free to comment

I'm brand new to the new Indigo (I toyed with version 3, maybe even 2). I had been using HomeSeer on the PC (since I run Z-wave)....

First of all, I have to say that the quality of the images, and overall focus on function and actual utility, of the pages you guys are creating blows away what those guys are doing. It's very inspiring.

I'm just getting started, but a question I have is: how do I get the overlay screen done (with the little x in it)?

Thanks,

Bhavesh Patel

Just a start here. Not much added to the floor plan just yet.