Another novel (and silly) use for Roomie

David McGrath — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:35:46 +0000

I’ve been working (rather obsessively) on Roomie for the past week. In specific, I have rewritten the XML-based protocol that allows the desktop client to communicate with the web service. (Say “hi” to it here.) The new library (which I call WebCommunicator) is sooo much easier to use than my old one, but still has all the nifty (and important) encryption and anti-hacking features. I will eventually publish the protocol as an independent library. (Give me a bit to use it more and work out all the kinks.)

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.

Roomie gets some CSS schooling

David McGrath — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:30:45 +0000

This week I have been furiously re-writing a few key elements of the Roomie website. Specifically, I scrapped the old device button controls, which you can see here. They were ok, but they were very rigid in use, offering only two different pictures to back the buttons. Zooming on mobile devices didn’t work so great either, since the images were PNGs, raster graphics. Now I have created a button framework entirely in CSS, HTML, and ASP.NET controls. Because of this, I can easily create new kinds of controls completely in code, and they even zoom cleanly as well. My original vision for this was to enable the user to create “virtual device controls”, which would display next to the regular device controls.

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.

My Piece of the Inter(.)net » Web Development

Another novel (and silly) use for Roomie

Roomie gets some CSS schooling