We decided to see if we could share our enthusiasm with a larger group of Domoticans; cause there are a lot of Domotica related things you can do with the Arduino platform. Normally Domotica related hardware is quite expensive and closed, in the sence that every manufacturer creates its own proprietary protocol and tries to keep it a secret as much as possible; even changing it for the sole purpose of making all knowledge gathered by reverse engineering useless(!). Interaction between products of different companies is still very hard (if at all) to find – and most Domoticans are forced to use commercial Home Automation software like Homeseer to tie it all together. However, without a Plugin available for that special type of hardware you’d like to use, you’re practically doomed…

So when we started thinking about organizing an Arduino workshop for the members of the Domoticaforum Europe, we knew right away that we couldn’t do that without also supplying a Homeseer Plugin with it; well at least create a framework that would enable the workshop attendees to connect their new Arduino-based hardware to the most used HA software here in the Netherlands.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen; when we get enough response (a mimimum of 15) to our post on the Domotica forum and we decide to go ahead with organizing this workshop, we’ll also have to start thinking about how to create an easy to use, flexible, future proof Plugin that can interface with the Arduino platform and it’s compatibles like (my favorite) JeeNodes..

It will be fun! As always

As i mentioned before, there were still some interesting things that could be added to the Plug-in and i thought it was time to revive the Plugin by adding some functionality that was asked for, make it future proof by supporting the newer firmware versions. Some of the things that have been added in the last 2 weeks are:

- Retrieving the Phone Book from the Fritz!Box and using it for Caller ID(entification);

- Searching websites on the Internet for Caller ID;

- Supporting the challenge/response security mechanism built into new firmware;

- Switching the WLAN from Homeseer;

- some useful stuff for use in scripts;

- upgrade of configuration pages to ASP.NET.

You can read all about it in more detail on domoticaforum.eu

This should do for some time; maybe some small additions or fixes, but that’s it for now; time to move on to development of another brand new and exciting Plugin!

The last couple of days i was looking at how i could spend the huge amounts of free time i have lately and decided to spend it on extending the Plugin with some extra features; the Fritz!Box has a lot to offer, so there are still a lot of things to explore.

But first i had to tackle the new way of logging in to the Web-interface that has changed in the recent firmware versions (xx.04.74 and higher). This new method of logging in involves calculating MD5 value based on a challenge provided by the Fritz!Box, and having read once that a lot of faulty MD5 routines exist, i decided to look into that issue first. I mean, creating additional functionality without supporting the latest firmware sounds rather stupid to me.
OK, the sequence of actions to do a successful login were clear to me, that wouldn’t be the problem; only thing i hoped for was that the calculation of the MD5 hash would succeed with the .NET provided classes/routines. So i created a simple function that could return the MD5 of a given string:

The resulting md5bytes should contain the correct hash value when each byte was written as hex string value and all 16 of them were concatenated. But something strange was going on…

The AVM documentation stated the resulting MD5 should be: 9e224a41eeefa284df7bb0f26c2913e2 And what did i get? 58224a41eeefa284df7bb0f26c2913e2.

What’s this… well OK, it’s almost the same, maybe it will work, lol.
On the contrary, this ain’t funny at all of course… what’s going on here ??? I just didn’t know what was wrong; was it the encoding? The AVM guideline speaks of UTF-16LE (LE = Little Endian), BOM, trailing 0-bytes, Codepoints; not really the stuff i deal with on a daily basis, so …??

Searching MSDN i found this:

With just a tiny adjustment (there where the cursor is) and it worked…

I still don’t understand why; these things can really bug me and now i’m struggling to either just go on and let it be, or go to the bottom of this?

Let’s hope i don’t encounter to much of these mysteries.. 

Here some screenshots of the plugin:

The Plugin supports Serial connection type as well as Ethernet. Reason for this is that i have to be able to support the Plugin, but i have my interface connected to Ethernet by means of a Serial device server, the Sollae EZL-400S. This device is located at my fuse cabinet, where a ACT TI213, PLCBUS PLC1141 and this interface are connected to it. I have 1 RS232 port available.. but not for long i think

The screenshot below shows the sensor configuration page:

Visonic Sensor Configuration

Depending on what the sensor is used for, you can change the text that will be shown on the HS Status page when a sensor is in Alert status or not:

Homeseer Status page

Here’s what the Interface looks like:

Some details:

Connection : RS-232, 9600,8,N,1.
Number of sensors supported : unlimited
Power supply : 12V DC
LED indicators : COM and Power

A very nice feature of this interface is that every received packet comes with information about the signal level, so you know exactly how good (or not) a specific sensor is being received. I’ve made some charts of these signal levels here. As you can see in the charts, some sensors are always received very good like the front door, others sometimes show strange ‘dips’.

Another very positive thing is that this interface receives Visonic keyfobs very well. From the day i started using this interface i have an event active that is triggered by the aux button on my Visonic keyfob that will open/close the garage door for me. It works perfectly.
I got the interface from Waakzaam Wonen (http://www.waakzaamwonen.nl), so if you’re interested i would suggest to contact them for more information.
I’ve also developed a HS Plugin for this interface. Pieter Knuvers and i have been testing this plugin thoroughly and i’m planning to release the Plugin in the next few days. Hopefully this will result in valuable input for more functionality to be added to the plugin. If anyone is  interested just leave a comment.
Update 22-07-2009: Waakzaam Wonen has made the interface available in their webshop

Fritz!Box Plugin Devices in Homeseer

Work on the Fritz!Box Plugin for Homeseer is progressing. Currently it’s being tested while i’m working on the code to log all phone calls to an Access database.

The Plugin has been tested with the Fritz!Box FON WLAN 7170 and the 7270. Other models will be added to this list as more users will start using the Plugin.

This is what the Plugin Config page looks like:

Fritz!Box Plugin Configuration Page

The nicest feature (IMO) is that the information displayed in the Devicestring is user configurable.

That means that the user has control of what pieces of information (incoming or outgoing, phone numbers, call duration) are shown and their sequence.

I must say, after getting a bit familiar with Homeseer (i’ve never used it before, but had to install it to test my own plugin), i’m beginning to like writing Plugins for it But using Homeseer as a regular user? No, not my cup of tea…

Fritz!Box FON 7170

Not for myself ofcourse (i’m not using Homeseer), but just to see if i could do a thing like that. And to help a Domotica buddy ofcourse

Not knowing anything about Homeseer, i managed to create a plugin that could serve as a trigger for Homeseer events. The plugin is going to be tested in the next couple of days. I hope everything will work out as expected and the plugin is stable enough to continue building on  a Homeseer plugin that could be usefull to all those who own both Homeseer and this Fritz.