Posted: January 09 2004 at 19:20 | IP Logged

Happy New Year to you all!

I'm very happy with my PH's ability to control my house so far. Even the Christmas Lights although PH merely makes sure they come on at sunset and go out at 12:30 AM. Chevy Chase I'm not.

My present quandry is: how do I make my control center look like the neat display on page 12 of the manual?? I haven't been able to figure out how to add the shaded rectangles for zoning or adding disenbodied (or is it disenbuttoned?) text etc. All I can do is change the buttons themselves in the Design View Window. How do you guys do it?

Also, I've been following the threads on programming PH for the X-10 security devices. I have the security system box from X-10 openned and decided to forgo the standard and "customize" the actions via PH hopefully with recording cameras integrated with it.

Posted: January 09 2004 at 20:08 | IP Logged

Pat,

I couldn't help but chuckle concerning your question about the Control Center.  Im afraid the answer is quite easy but probably not what you expect.  That main Control Center page you're talking about is nothing more than a GIF I created in Windows Paint.  All of the cool graphics, rectangles, dis-embuttoned text, etc. is a part of that Control Centers background GIF image.  This image is actually included in your PowerHome install in the PowerHome directory and is called qc.gif.  On top of this background picture are a number of buttons without text and transparent backgrounds so the graphics come through.  Some of the buttons have colored backgrounds instead of transparent .  This info probably comes as a disappointment since you probably thought it was built into PowerHome.  Ive had requests to add additional controls such as these and have looked into adding them.  But every object I place on the Control Center (rectangle, graphic, text, etc.) consumes resources and memory.  Also, adding additional items like this will complicate the web version of the Control Center.  By "cheating" and making all of the graphics, text, etc. a part of the background image, this counts as only 1 object.

But, using this same idea, you could place a graphical floorplan of your home as the background for the CC and then place buttons to control lights, etc at their appropriate locations.  In fact, in my own setup, Im going to take some digital pictures of various rooms in my house, place them on the Control Center and drop some transparent buttons over lights, appliances, IR equipment so I can control them that way.

Let me know how your efforts go with the Security devices since this is one area where I don't have any equipment to personally test with.  Also, if you have any problems, let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Dave.

Posted: January 11 2004 at 12:51 | IP Logged

Aha! Thanks Dave. I'll give it another try. I like your idea about the room pictures too.

Regarding the security devices, its on hold so I can get started on taxes but I'll post how things are going once I get back to it. In the meantime I'll depend on a large snarling dog.