New Icons

So, as part for preparations to make NetHomeServer open source, I have now replaced all commercial icons with open source icons from the "Tango Desktop Project". The downside is of course that the icons look a bit less "professional", some of them I had to draw (or modify) myself. The good part is that I have the vector image source for all of them so it is possible to improve them in a controlled manner. So this is the new look of NetHome.

Protocol Analyzer 2.0

Protocol Analyzer 2.0 is now released. It can be downloaded from http://wiki.nethome.nu/doku.php/analyzer/start. The analyzer now supports decoder plugins. This means that it is easy to write your own decoder for a new protocol and plug it in to the Protocol Analyzer. The same decoder plugin can also be used in the NethomeServer.

The Protocol Analyzer now also has a real installer both for windows and for other platforms.

More details about the changes can be seen in the release notes.

Open Source

I have now finally started publishing the NetHome stuff as open source on GitHub. I have started with the Protocol Analyzer tool, and published the source for that. Unfortunately this is the oldest Java code I have written, so it is not the most beautiful...
The biggest blocker was actually the Icons. A long time ago I got tired of spending time finding nice icons for my projects, so I bought a commercial library (http://www.iconexperience.com) which is really good - but... I have tried to contact them on how to handle the icons in open source projects and never got any answer. So in the end I have had to spend the time replacing all icons in the program with public domain icons, which really felt like a big waste of time.
This is now done and I am preparing for releasing version 2.0 of the Protocol Analyzer with some really nice new features.

Graphs

It has earlier been possible to see graphs in NetHomeServer via the separate Thermometer-GUI.

Now I have added the graphing feature to the main NetHomeServer GUI. Any HomeItem with a LogFile-attribute will automatically get a graph-link in the Room-page and in the Plan-page. When you press that link you will get to the graph page of that Item which will display a graph of the values in the log file. This feature is currently built in to all thermometer and humidity Items. On the Graph page you can view the data over a day, over a week and over a month and you can also move back and forth in the data. The graph is also interactive so you can zoom into the displayed graph by selecting an area with the mouse. This feature is currently available in the nightly build.

Need for Speed

I have not spent much time optimizing performance on the NetHomeServer before. I am running mine on a small Linux server which can present the WEB-GUI at a decent speed. I have however had comments from Raspberry Pi users who have thought that it is a bit sluggish. The limited processing power of the little Pi has raised the need for some optimizations. So now I have rewritten the Item model handling using some caching and the result was really good, especially on a Pi. Time to show the room-view went from 1.3 seconds to 55 milliseconds, and showing the details of a HomeItem went from 2.2 seconds to 35 milliseconds! The optimizations are available in the nightly build.

Tellstick Supported

So, support for TellstickDuo is now added to NetHomeServer. The new Home Item "Tellstick" is available in the nightly build. I have tested it on Windows 7, Ubuntu and Raspian (Raspberry Pi). I guess it will work for MAC as well, but I have not been able to test that yet. For transmission, all NetHome protocols are supported as the NetHome encoders are used. For reception only protocols supported by both Tellstick and NetHome works, as the Tellstick does the decoding of received signals in firmware and does not expose the raw pulses for the NetHome decoders to work with.

What took the most time was surprisingly to get good driver installations for Windows and Linux that works with Java, but I have compiled driver packages together with installation instructions for Windows and for Linux.

Tellstick Support

I keep getting questions about Tellstick support in NetHomeServer, so I finally started looking into it. It seems that the low level interfaces of the TellstickDuo matches NetHome quite well, so it should be possible to write a Tellstick HomeItem that still uses the NetHome protocol encoders (so it is possible to plug in your own encoder implementations). One snag was that it was a bit messy to access the interface from Java on Windows, but I finally managed to convince the FTDI virtual com port drivers that the Tellstick really is a COM-port, and after that it was possible to use RXTX as usual.