2014-02-24

New Items

I have now completed two new HomeItems that are quite useful. The first is a more advanced version of the Remap button for the Nexa Learning Code-system. It allows you to map remote control and wall switch buttons to actions in NetHome. What is new is that you can map separate actions for when you press the button, release the button and release after having pressed for a longer time. Action on release is useful when you want the action to send commands using the same radio band as the button uses. The item is called NexaLCAdvancedRemapButton.

The other item is the LampGroup. In the lamp group you can specify a number of lamps which belong to the group, and via the group item you can treat them all as one lamp. The group has actions to turn on, off, toggle and also dim to four preset levels. Lamps that does not support dim will simply be turned on. When you call the off-action on the group, it will remember which lamps were actually on at that time and the recall-action turns those lamps on again. As usual you can mix any kind of lamps: Philips Hue, Nexa, FS20 and so on.

Both items are in the nightly build.

2014-02-10

Philips Hue

So, now I have added support for Philips Hue in NetHomeServer. It is one HomeItem for the bridge and one HomeItem per lamp. The new auto configure feature is also supported, so you only have to create the bridge item manually. After that all available lamps will automatically present themselves on the create screen, so you do not have to configure any parameters for them.
The really nice thing is that you can as usual mix them with any other of the supported systems. I control my hue lamps with a Nexa wall switch and a FS-20 wall switch. That way I can trigger different scenarios (colors and dim levels) from wall switches or other events (like timers, temperature and so on). Hue actually works particularly well with Nexa-switches since they use different RF-frequencies, so the signal from the switch does not interfere with the signals sent to control the lamps.
These are the first lamps with bi-directional communication that I have added support for, so if the lamps change state outside of NetHomeServer's control, this will still be reflected in the NetHomeServer GUI.
I am still trying to figure out the best way of specifying the color of the lamp in the Item, currently one integer is interpreted as color temperature, and two integers separated by a comma as hue and saturation.
The feature is available in the nightly build.