Adobe AIR-Microsoft Silverlight - browserless interfaces

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Has anyone looked at writing an Adobe Air application to replace the current browser for vera?
It would be good if you could have a widget on your desktop which replaces the dashboard
of Vera so you would not have to open a browser. This application could be used as a virtual
touchpad and maybe someday be put in a touchpad.

Frank

2

There is a third party developing a custom front end for our Vera back end, for their own proprietary application. It’s really cool and visual, based on Flex, with lots of animation, zooming, floorplans, etc. We can’t show it, of course, since it belongs to them. But we have been releasing a lot of documentation about how to build new UI’s against our API. See this wiki: http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/UI_Notes

Frank, if you want to do a cool UI for Vera, let me know. We’d obviously support you 100% and give you all the tools and resources you’d need. I’d really like to see a UI like this, too, so it could be used on PDA’s, webpad’s, etc.

3

I have completed my adobe air project. Attached is a screen shot. It is a compact user interface that resides on my desktop and allows control over lights and scenes. It reads the vera json config file and creates the interface based on the contents of the config file. It updates the status of light switches and goes to sleep if there has been no activity for about 10 seconds.

I am quite happy with the results and wanted to share it with the vera community. If you want to try it, you can find the file and sample screenshots at a blog called air4vera. you can find it at http://air4vera.wordpress.com/. The application is about 1.8 mbytes, so I could not attach it here and wordpress does not allow .air files. So the file is shown on wordpress as a .ppt file. simple change the file extension after downloading to .air, install the adobe air runtime for your computer and you are good to go.

I would appreciate any feedback. I am not a professional programmer and did this as a hobby, so be gentle.

Let me know what you think.
Chairman Bubba

4

I think that’s the kind of sleek interface a lot of folks will appreciate. Thanks for taking the time to construct this AIR project and sharing it with everyone!

5

I read the whole story about your project. I think it came out great and can’t wait to try it. It does look simple to use and with everything in one small space without all the scrolling to get to the other devices.

6

I like the concept but wasn’t able to get it working. It started and I entered the ip address for the vera box on my network 192.168.1.3 this is the same address that use to access the vera web portal locally so I know that it is correct. When I select LOAD veraData I get an error message saying Cannot reach vera. I can then go to firefox and enter the same IP and access the web gui so I know the unit is working.

TIA

Jose

7

joserpaq, is it possible your copy of Air4Vera is having its outbound HTTP traffic blocked by a Firewall running on your PC?

If so, you may have to create an ‘Exception’ for Air4Vera, so it can reach other IP addresses on your LAN.

Just a thought…

8

Tried it out, didn’t see the note at first about running it as an administrator in vista/7. But I still couldn’t get it to connect after running it as admin. I completely disabled the windows firewall which is the only firewall i have on my laptop and still couldn’t connect. It gave an error saying it couldn’t find it.

9

Well, I am not sure what the problem could be. The only time I had connection problems was with Windows 7 and running as an admin fixed that. Here is the address air4vera is attempting to
connect to:

http://172.16.10.180:3451/data_request?id=zwave_status&output_format=json

I suggest you try to connect to this link, using your own IP address. If you get the json file, there
is no reason I can think of re: why air4vera could not get it. Let me know.

Chairman_bubba

10

I’ve tried it and it does not work. and the link you gave and subed my internal IP for vera>

11

[quote=“chairman_bubba, post:9, topic:164326”]Well, I am not sure what the problem could be. The only time I had connection problems was with Windows 7 and running as an admin fixed that. Here is the address air4vera is attempting to
connect to:

http://172.16.10.180:3451/data_request?id=zwave_status&output_format=json

I suggest you try to connect to this link, using your own IP address. If you get the json file, there
is no reason I can think of re: why air4vera could not get it. Let me know.

Chairman_bubba[/quote]

The port is the problem, I have upgraded to 862 and I saw in another thread that it uses port 49451, but it doesn’t use 3451 anymore.

12

Well, I am using a production release of vera and it works fine. I will pull out the port
number and make it a user input and repost a new thread.

You are running the latest version.
Running Version : 1.0.616
Latest Version : 1.0.616

13

[quote=“LibraSun, post:7, topic:164326”]joserpaq, is it possible your copy of Air4Vera is having its outbound HTTP traffic blocked by a Firewall running on your PC?

If so, you may have to create an ‘Exception’ for Air4Vera, so it can reach other IP addresses on your LAN.

Just a thought…[/quote]
I’m running osx 10.5 with firewalls turned off. I’ll try the port change and advise.

14

How do you change your port number in the application?

15

Don’t think you can right now

16

The port number was hard wired. I did not know it had changed. I am in the process of letting the port number be entered by the user, but am still having trouble with those who have tried it. I wonder if the format of the json file has also changed…

More later. If you want to play around with the latest copy send me an email and I
will send you 1.6 which lets you program the port.

air4vera@gmail.com

17

Is 1.6 your new version?

18

I am going to put v1.6 up now, but it does not work with the LUUP versions of
vera. It has only been tested with vera version 1.0.616 and that version uses
port 3451.

My suspicion is the json file format has changed or some other interface and i will
have to dig into it.

I will post v1.6 of air4vera now with these restrictions. Only works with the
production version of vera.

19

ok
thx

20

oh my gosh. just got the json file format for the LUUP version of vera software.
it has changed completely and air4vera simply will not work. Much of the logic
is centered around parsing the json file and it will all have to be rewritten before it
will work.

So, if you are using 1.0.616 or earlier, this program should work.

My apologies to those of you who spent time on this with bad results.

So, do you think this kind of thing is worth my time going back and redoing it?
Just curious…