Re: MisterHouse xAP BSC Support ??

[Gregg Liming <gregg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin Hawkins wrote:

>Possibly Gregg can answer this...
>
>    Not (currently) being a Misterhouse user, I wonder does it support
>the xAP BSC (Basic Status and Control ) schema ?
>
Not yet.  But, it is very high on my to-do list.  The real issue for me
is how best to perform the integration.  Initially, it will probably
permit automatic inclusion of all x10 supported objects.  I'd also
include support for manually identifying other objects of interest.  I
hope to begin working on this soon (e.g., next week).

>BSC is a very simple
>schema that allows realtime status monitoring and control of devices in
>a 'standard' way allowing devices to operate in a  'plug and play'
>fashion immediately at power on.  Therefore BSC compatible devices
could
>be directly integrated into Misterhouse or any BSC savvy app without
>needing specific code/plugins, (indeed that was one of the main
>objectives of BSC). Likewise all MisterHouse supported devices can
>represent themselves on xAP as BSC devices.
>
>
Currently, mh declares the xap header source to essentially reference
the mh instance (e.g., mhouse.mh.main)--not a specific device.  From
looking at a recent thread on x10 and BSC, I assume that I now need to
ensure that the source is appended with :<devicename> (e.g.,
":hallway_light")--correct?

>    BSC supports three types of basic device that cover  around 99% of
>all device types.  BINARY onoff,   LEVEL (eg lights) at any resolution
>or % based, and TEXT eg news. weather,TV listings, serial data etc.
>
Oh--I hadn't read the spec closely enough.  Text as well--hunh?  Is
there a discussion in the spec about what is (more importantly--is not)
permitted (e.g., max length, special chars, etc.)?

On a slightly related note, I have a VR app (multi-platform as it's
engine is the Sphinx4 java engine) that "talks" whatever xAP
schema
(and, theoretically, xPL--just untested) is entered into a config file
(not easy and currently, not documented). It is now just sending out a
mh-specific schema because I couldn't figure out how to include the VR
command into BSC. Perhaps TEXT will do the trick.

>  A
>more complex device like the xAP Netiom which has 16 inputs, 16
>outputs,  4 Analogue inputs and a serial port can be fully represented
>using BSC and each node would then be accessible in Misterhouse .
>
>
Yeah--I really want to get me hands on one of these

Perhaps a tangent, but Bruce Winter (Misterhouse's creator) recently
added support into mh to "sync" the state of two running mh
instances
using xAP (albeit--again, a mh-specific schema).  Currently, the support
is really only applicable for "slaving" or monitoring--not for
real-time
failover/redundancy.  However, I'm interested in the latter (for more
critical operations).  Has any thought gone into this specific to xAP
(additions to schema; guidelines on target wildcarding; etc.)?