I spend most of my time on the Devices page, which lists all of the devices in all home automation networks on my account.  (Right now I only have a single Z-Wave network, but in theory I could have a potpourri of different networks that include other existing home automation frameworks, IR transceivers, and—I dunno—USB missile launchers?)

Anyway, the UI all works, and dynamically updates when a devices state changes.  Cool!

Here is the DateTime regular expression.  Note that when I new the regular expression object, I set whitespace and casing ignoring.

Named capturing groups allows code like this:

In the end, the utility class allows code like this:

fun!  Download all of the code here.

Have any suggestions about the code?  Any neat C# features I should have used?  Comment below!

But enough technical talk.  Lets get to serious business.  Here I have a little RoomieScript that I wrote, just as a proof of concept.

<RoomieScript>
  <ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
  <Core.Loop>
    <ZWave.WaitForChange DeviceName="Coffee Pot" PollInterval="5 Seconds" />
    <ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
    <RoomieBot.TextDavid Text="No coffee!" />
  </Core.Loop>
</RoomieScript>

Here Roomie waits until the coffee maker is turned on, then turns it off and sends me a terse text message. Yes, it works!  And yes, I do use Roomie for legitimate things, but ah… it’s so just that much fun to be dumb.

Interested in beta testing Roomie?  Send me a message.

As you can see above, I have the Roomie website’s main page displaying on an iPad.  The first two controls are an example of the new feature.  Before I go to bed I might want to click the “set alarm” button, which would run a RoomieScript that I wrote that wakes me up in the morning.  The same deal goes for coffee. (Of course, making coffee is also part of the alarm routine.)  It would be easy to imagine many other virtual devices.  Eventually I will likely make a “basement” device, which would have buttons like “Movie” for nice movie lighting, “all on”, “all off”, and of course, “PAAARRTAAYY!”

I mentioned that these controls were highly customizable in code.  In the C# code-behind I can set the size of these controls with pixel precision.  That came in really handy when I made an iPad-specific page, which resizes the controls to be just the right width to fill the screen horizontally and high enough for easy pressing with a finger.  A tweak of the sizes only takes a few seconds.

All of this has been a really good learning experience for me, and of course I am far from done.  I’ve applied so much of what I’ve learned writing Roomie, which is just for fun, to other projects at work and in school.  If you want to help test Roomie, send me an email.

You can download the project here, but since I know most people just want to get some quick answers, here’s a few code snippets:

This following is a member method of a WPF Window.

The following is an example of a member method of a WPF window that runs itself in a separate thread. 

The project file contains more examples, including handling multithreaded events, how to create custom delegates, getting thread states, and intelligently killing threads when the program shuts down.

With Arcadia I have committed to research everything that I suspect will make for a better design. Because of this, Archaida’s backend is shaping up to be elegant and efficient. I researched how to do inheritance in C#, and have used that to save myself from writing a lot of code. This has drastically decreased development and testing time. I learned how to use basic regular expressions over the summer, and have used them in some areas (more on that later). For the frontend I decided to switch from WinForms to WPF. All I can say is that databinding is epic, and I still have a lot more to learn about it.

Here’s a shot of Arcadia in its current form:

I’ll hopefully release an alpha soon.

edit October 12, 2009 at 10:57am:

Also generics. Generics are amazing. (More on that later, too.)

   1: //needed for printf()

   2: #include <stdio.h>

   3:  

   4: //needed for strlen()

   5: #include <string.h>

   6:  

   7: // prints the contents of memory in hex and ascii.

   8: // starts at the location of the pointer "start"

   9: // prints "length" bytes of memory.

  10: void Print_Memory(const unsigned char * start, unsigned int length)

  11: {

  12:     //create row, col, and i.  Set i to 0

  13:     int row, col, i = 0;

  14:  

  15:     //iterate through the rows, which will be 16 bytes of memory wide

  16:     for(row = 0; (i + 1) < length; row++)

  17:     {

  18:         //print hex representation

  19:         for(col = 0; col<16; col++)

  20:         {

  21:             //calculate the current index

  22:             i = row*16+col;

  23:             

  24:             //divides a row of 16 into two columns of 8

  25:             if(col==8)

  26:                 printf(" ");

  27:             

  28:             //print the hex value if the current index is in range.

  29:             if(i<length)

  30:                 printf("%02X", start[i]);

  31:             //print a blank if the current index is past the end

  32:             else

  33:                 printf("  ");

  34:             

  35:             //print a space to keep the values separate

  36:             printf(" ");

  37:         }

  38:         

  39:         //create a vertial seperator between hex and ascii representations

  40:         printf(" ");

  41:  

  42:         //print ascii representation

  43:         for(col = 0; col<16; col++)

  44:         {

  45:             //calculate the current index

  46:             i = row*16+col;

  47:             

  48:             //divides a row of 16 into two coumns of 8

  49:             if(col==8)

  50:                 printf("  ");

  51:             

  52:             //print the value if it is in range

  53:             if(i<length)

  54:             {

  55:                 //print the ascii value if applicable

  56:                 if(start[i]>0x20 && start[i]<0x7F)  //A-Z

  57:                     printf("%c", start[i]);

  58:                 //print a period if the value is not printable

  59:                 else

  60:                     printf(".");

  61:             }

  62:             //nothing else to print, so break out of this for loop

  63:             else

  64:                 break;

  65:         }

  66:         

  67:         //create a new row

  68:         printf("\n");

  69:     }

  70: }

  71:  

  72: // Prints the contents of memory in hex and ascii.

  73: // Prints the memory between and including the

  74: // two "end1" and "end2" pointers.

  75: void Print_Memory(const unsigned char * end1, const unsigned char * end2)

  76: {

  77:     if(end2 >= end1)

  78:         Print_Memory(end1, end2 - end1 + 1);

  79:     else

  80:         Print_Memory(end2, end1 - end2 + 1);

  81: }

  82:  

  83: int main(int argc, char **args)

  84: {

  85:     const char start [] = "hi there!  You're looking at me in memory!";

  86:     const char * end = start + (int)strlen(start);

  87:  

  88:     Print_Memory((unsigned char *)start, (unsigned char *)end);

  89:  

  90:     return 0;

  91: }

I’ve compiled this code with both g++ and Visual C++.

download here

Here is the program’s output:

68 69 20 74 68 65 72 65  21 20 20 59 6F 75 27 72  hi.there  !..You'r
65 20 6C 6F 6F 6B 69 6E  67 20 61 74 20 6D 65 20  e.lookin  g.at.me.
69 6E 20 6D 65 6D 6F 72  79 21 00                 in.memor  y!.