UI/Renditions for Custom Device Types and/or ServiceId's

Developer's Corner General Dev Discussions
1

@MCV, when folks build custom Device Types, and the related Service Id descriptors, what is the prescribed model for getting them to “Render” in the Runtime UI?

I’ve changed my Alarm Panel code to create a new DeviceType that I created (D_AlarmPartition.xml, S_AlarmPartition.xml attached) to describe the (current) state variables, along with the Scene events that it understands.

The new events are described here:
http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Paradox_Alarm_Plugin#Alarm_Area_Scene_Events

This was done to minimize the use of the MotionSensor1 Child devices, per a discussion we had a week ago, and to create a more natural experience for users in Scene definitions.

The downside though, is that people no longer get a “current state” indicator (like the Red/Green dot for a MotionSensor1, or the battery bar in some components etc). I’ve left in my old MotionSensor devices as a “parallel” so folks can get some sort of status/UI until something is in place for Custom Device Types.

http://wiki.micasaverde.com/images/d/db/ParadoxAlarm-DevicesView.png

What is the plan, timeframe and/or release vehicle for a UI atop the Service Definition that a device exposes?

2

What about an “HTML/Javascript window” within the MCV GUI for Luup devices?

Should be easy to implement for MCV and would allow Luup devices to
use HTML and Javascript to present the data on the MCV GUI.

Of course, this would be a quick and dirty hack, but I am not sure whether we will
see a “Luup/Lua GUI toolkit” by MCV in the near future.

3

I would highly apreciate to have the UI reflect elements (e.g. a boolean variable would show up a checkbox) used in custom devices.
Maybe by putting another tag within the interface description or something like that.

4

I would suggest to make UI element pluggable (they usually are, but I mean easily pluggable), so they could become a part of community effort. There might be one or two web designers around now or in future that could contribute…

5

Just replied with the email contact for our web developer and said that we’re doing a completely new top-down UI, this time in Flash, that will have the ability to create your own control types. So we decided not to invest the time patching the current UI to do this. Our web dev will need to hardcode the control pad to your custom device type for the current UI because the new flash-based UI (which is graphical based on 3D floorplans) is still a ways out.

6

ok, I responded to the Web Developer directly in eMail this morning, but just in case folks want to see where this is going, I used some icons from icons.mysitemyway.com to pilot the UI “states” that the Alarm Panel is in.

eg. Disarmed, Stay, Stay-Breach, Away and Away-Breach

I’ve attached the icons to give a “theme” for what it could look like, depending upon how MCV’s UI Designer makes their versions.

Given the Service description, and behavior, the render logic is something like:

if (Disarmed == 1) then display alarm-disarmed.png else if (StayArmed == 1) then if (Breach == 1) then display alarm-stay-breach.png else display alarm-stay.png end elseif (Armed == 1) then if (Breach == 1) then display alarm-away-breach.png else display alarm-away.png end else -- This is a bug... display a bug icon or text... end end

For now it looks like they’ll have to wire up the [current] UI to “know” the specific ServiceId that I used for the Alarm “Area” (Partition in some Alarm systems) as described/attached above.

Sounds like the Flash UI will improve that situation (except for iPhone since there’s no Flash)

The demo icons are Animated PNG, so the alarm-breach and alarm-stay-breach will animate (on Firefox) when there’s an issue. Trying to keep the “text” in the UI to a minimum to make it more international (with the exception of any 508 Compliance strings)

Hopefully the 4x example image attachments will show :wink: