Girder 5

[jonkjon]

Before i try that (Turning off UAC caused some issues for me before with anothe app), when i try to send an event with the Girder Bridge device as we now have it (copied and renamed Csevent.exe to ieventc.exe), Housebot hangs in that it leave an instance of ieventc running in the background and i cannot terminate HB unless i go into the task manager and stop the instance of Hb that is still running. Then, if i try and restat HB, a rather nasty dialog appears:

Trace Section 'System Monitor' generated an assertion, File:
<C:\HB\Development\ServerFrame\SystemMonitor.cpp> Line:<382>.
Unable to start the IP Server. check for conflict with port5015

and i am unable to start HB. I have to go into task manager and kill the ieventc process that is still running. I assume that HB is firing off ieventc as it should when i change the event string property of girder bridge, but the command is hanging for some reason.
I thought that i would pass along this error message in case it may offer some clues as to why the event isn't getting passed to girder5 properly.

[ScottBot]

I'm guessing that HouseBot is stuck waiting for the OS to verify the permission for the action. I'm not sure why the prompt wouldn't be displayed. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

[jonkjon]

Boy! Turned off UAC and had no luck. Turned UAC back on and my hb configuration, themes,including backups inside of hb were hosed. I don't know why but man am i glad i had backups of the entire HB directory on another drive.......whew!

[jonkjon]

It looks like the easiest way to do this for now is to use the execute program device to run event.exe. Just pass in the command line arguments and then go into girder and drag and drop the event that is captured in the log file to the action that you want to perform.

[ScottBot]

I'm thinking that the execute program device may have the same issue. If you give me a couple of days, I'll try and update the plugin to work the way it should with Vista.

[jonkjon]

That's fine. I have run the execute program device and, for the moment, that is working. Thanks for being so responsive. Your support of HB is incredible.

[ScottBot]

I spent a bit of time and fixed the old version of Girder issue when trying to call ieventc in Vista. I thought it would be a simple matter to move from that to Girder 5 and get that working too. However, I'm having a problem understanding the new paradigm and, particularly the "device" concept. When calling csevent, it seems to require (although the help says it doesn't) a "device" string on the command line. I have no idea what a "device" is. I've been in the "File/Settings/Device Manager" dialog, but it only shows "No Devices" as an option, and I can't figure out how to add a new device. What am I missing here?

Girder 5 really seems to have added a lot of features and looks to be very different. It's probably very configurable, but almost as hard to learn as HouseBot

[jonkjon]

Yeah, the help file hasn't caught up to the application yet. That really makes learning Girder difficult in my opinion. Anyhooo......A device is just like in HB except that they include interfaces as devices too and it is a little strange in how you add them. Devices in G5, i think, are based on plugins. So for example to get an Insteon device working, you have to go to file/settings and choose plugins. If you don't see the Insteon plugin listed, (i think it is a choice during installation) , you have to go to the site to download it. In the case of the Insteon plugin, it's not free. There is a 30 day trial but you then have to contact support to get the license to get it to work. After all of that, once you get the Insteon plugin to show up, you have to click on the general tab in the settings dialog, scroll the tabs over to the right and that is where you enter the license fotr the Insteon plugin.
Next, you go to file/component manager/Lighting/appliances/Insteon.YAY! This is where you would begin adding devices. Not all devices are that hard to configure. The Global Cache device is pretty easy as the plugin is already included, you just need to make sure that it has a tick mark by it inside of the settings dialog and then go to component manager to enable it.
Now the bad news for Vista. I had some issues loading the dmex web site that shows and controls devices. I worked with support for several days before they found the problem. This is the fix from the forum:

Just for future reference we tracked this down to a problem in the lua date library. Apperently on Vista it give a 'date format to long' error and bails out. So comment out the line 304 if you are have trouble from httpdmex.lua


Code:
math.randomseed(os.date("%d%H%M%s"))into


Code:
--math.randomseed(os.date("%d%H%M%s"))

So in conclusion, i think that whenever you need a device id, you can use 18 as that is the id for Girder itself. If you can get an event to fire in the Log window, you'll have all you need as the rest of the configuration is done inside of G5.

[ScottBot]

My Girder testing has always been pretty simple. I just create a command to play a wave file when the event is triggered. In my testing for Girder 5, I was not able to actually get the command to trigger, but I can see in the status line and the log that the eventstring was received. So I'm thinking that there's just some linkage configuration that I'm missing somewhere. Since you've clearly got a better grip on how it works, I'll just pass this along to you for testing.

I've fixed the plugin to work with the Vista UAC. I've also added a new property called "path to csevent.exe". Now if you fill in the "path to csevent.exe", the Device will assume you have a Version 5 girder and work a tad differently. Make sure to only supply a value for either path to csevent.exe or path to ieventc.exe (not both).

So I'm just using 18 for the device number. I guess if I would have followed the example given more literally, I might have stumbled onto the fact that 18 worked for some reason.

You can download the new version here. Just unzip and copy into your \HouseBot\Plugins\Devices directory (backup the old version first). Let me know if it works for you.

[jonkjon]

The new Girder Bridge is working great. The only thing is that when i get to the device selection list to add the Girder Bridge Device, there are two Girder Bridge's listed in the list. I did remove the original from the plugins\devices folder and restarted HB so i don't think it's anything i'm doing. Other than that, once again you have outdone yourself.

[ScottBot]

...The only thing is that when i get to the device selection list to add the Girder Bridge Device, there are two Girder Bridge's listed in the list. I did remove the original from the plugins\devices folder and restarted HB so i don't think it's anything i'm doing....

That's strange. Did you actually remove it from the Devices folder, or just rename it? If you just renamed it to *something*.dll, it would cause it to still show in the Device selection list (therefore showing two of them).

[jonkjon]

At first i just renamed it. Then, thinking as you suggest, i actually moved it, restarted HB and it's still there. I am not at home right now, but i will try restarting again this evening when i get home. It was rather late when i got home last night so i may have missed the second restart but i don't think i did.

[jonkjon]

Well, i thought i removed it from the directory......all is fine. I somehow didn't move the file to another directory. I just copied it...... Thanks again for such great support and dedication. This is one really terrific piece of software.......

[incoronado]

FYI. The new GirderBridgeDevice.dll may have fixed girder 5, but broke girder 3. I have never found it advantageous to upgrade my version of girder. Girder versions 4-5 were considerably overpriced for what I needed it to do. I found an old version of the GirderBridgeDevice.dll and I have it working. I had to delete and recreate the device to make it work. I recommend adding a version parameter in the configuration so it handles the ieventc.exe parameters properly depending on which version of girder you use to make it backwards compatible.

[ScottBot]

The new plugin support for Girder 5 should be backward compatible with earlier versions. The only trick to having it work with versions prior to 5 is to make sure that the Path To csevent.exe Property is empty and the Path To ieventc.exe Property must have the correct path.

Was there an error that you were seeing, or anything to indicate what the problem might be?