Bad reception

While fixing the transmission on CUL, I discovered that changing the data-rate settings on the CC1101-chip changed the behavior on the reception side as well. I don’t quite understand why, since I do not use any of the built in decoding features. But it awakened my hope of getting the reception to work. So I tried increasing the data rate setting to 10KBaud. The result was that it could now decode the fast pulses of the NexaL-protocol, but no other, slower protocol now worked. The signals of them now were drowned in noise instead. Deep sigh. I will have to release without support for reception.

CUL on MAC

The work with the CUL transmitter progresses. The Pronto Encoder now supports both the one time burst sequence and the repeated burst sequence of the Pronto Code, which are often used by IR protocols.
We have now also tested the CUL-support on MAC (Both a MAC Book Pro and a MacMini) and verified that it works.

Sending IR with CUL

I finally had a positive breakthrough with the CUL-stick. It has been working fine for sending to all supported protocols on the 433MHz band for controlling switches. But this band is also used for IR-extension devices such as the PowerMid, which is used to transmit IR remote control signals via radio. If I could tap in to their protocol, the CUL-stick could also be used as a generic IR-transmitter via a PowerMid! And now I finally got that to work. By modulating the mark pulses with 40KHz, the signal is received by the PowerMid receiver and sent as IR signals! This makes the CUL stick kind of a Swiss army knife of home control – both light switches and any IR remote controlled device can be managed!

Automatic Build

Now I have finally managed to get a complete tool chain for continuous automated builds of the NetHomeServer. I have been using Subversion, JUnit and Eclipse for quite a while, but always been building and running the JUnit tests from Eclipse. Now I have completed the tool chain with ant-scripts to do the builds and tests and finally Hudson to actually perform the builds and tests automatically every night. Hudson was a new experience for me, and quite a pleasant one. Hudson is a relatively new open source tool for automated builds and it was very easy to set up and configure on my Ubuntu-server. A really nice touch is that it can automatically download and install the Java-JDK:s and Ant-versions you need.

There is however one little detail that is very poorly documented, and that is how you configure the local URL-path when you run it as a daemon. You need to change it so it is not directly under the root-url in order to be able to access it via an Apache proxy (for example to http://myserver:8080/hudson). This is done by editing “/etc/default/Hudson” and adding the argument “--prefix=/hudson” in the HUDSON_ARGS-variable. It’s these little annoying things that take up 90% of the time when you are installing new stuff.

The automatic build are now transferred to the download page every night together with the test report for that build. The builds are made from the current state of the trunk, so they may be unstable and contain unfinished functions – but they are fresh :-).

More eyes

I have now lured another developer into the project ;-). Peter is a professional WEB-developer and has already begun on a very interesting new function in the HomeManager, I hope to be able to report more when the implementation progresses…

It is always good to get a fresh pair of eyes on the code. Peter immediately started harassing me about the unorganized package structure and the unfinished ant build scripts – and of course he is right. It is easy to get lazy when you are the only one roaming around in the code. So I have spent some time on house-cleaning the code now and it has improved the quality and readability. Thanks Peter.

Beta Testing Analyzer

The ProtocolAnalyzer 1.1 is finally ready for beta testing. I am aiming for supporting Windows, Linux and Mac OS X in this release. A group of active users have agreed to help me with the testing, and they have now started using it (and started giving feedback).

I have tried to find users that cover the main areas of OS and hardware like Windows, Linux, Mac, UPM-based samplers and CUL-transceiver.

MAC OS X

I am now working on a new release of the Analyzer. My goal is to include support for MAC OS X in this release, and I am currently getting help in solving the problems that surface in that OS. The old Java promise “Write once – run everywhere” is not entirely true… There are still some problems with both SWT and the sound samplings. Hopefully we will have these problems solved soon so beta testing can begin.

I have also discovered that the hardware modification of the UPM-thermometer does not work well with some USB-sound cards. I have received good feedback and alternative connections from users (thanks Walter) and I will update the descriptions on the site.