Combine the Nemef Radaris Evolution furniture with a Nemef RF Module and you’ve got all the the ingredients to fully integrate the Nemef Radaris Evolution door lock(s) into your Domotica system. However, that’s where things get harder – as far as I know, there’s no (consumer) software available for the connection between the Nemef Radaris Evolution and Home Automation systems. No Plugin, module, app or anything like that to monitor and/or control the Nemef Radaris. Only 3 guys (I know of) have implemented this in their own homebrew system; Pieter Knuvers is one of them.

But this can change very rapidly; I’m working on a Homeseer Plugin for the Nemef Radaris Evolution.

With this Plugin (and a Nemef RF Module (dutch link)) it will be possible to monitor and control up to 4 Nemef Radaris Evolution (dutch link) door furnitures. Opening the door, badge management (yep, you can stow away your programming card), viewing historical data (what badge was used where and when), it’s all in the Plugin. Want to give a badge access only during a certain time period on a certain day? The Nemef Radaris Evolution Plugin and a small script can accomplish just that.

The basis of the Plugin is almost finished now; I already tested the basic functionality by feeding my own historical data to the Plugin and this looks just fine.

Now it’s time to provide the necessary event triggers to Homeseer, so that the Nemef Radaris Evolution door furnitures can really become a part of that bigger picture, called Home Automation.

• Celsius support;
• Support for the IMT series thermostats;
• Support for the IMT series Humidity sensor.

Although I received the code only for adding Celsius support, I’m sure the Homeseer guys won’t mind I added those other 2 items as well

I was fortunate to have a IMT350 here, sent to me by a Domoticaforum member who found out that the IMT350 wasn’t supported by the current version of the Plugin and asked me to have a look at it. So I did, and in the process I added support for the IMT350 to the Plugin.

Together with another Homeseer user who volunteered as beta tester for the Plugin, we accomplished the 3rd item in the list, support for the Humidity sensor. While I was writing the code for the IMT350, I realized that the first thing that would be missing, was support for the humidity sensor and I just couldn’t leave it like that; it felt like delivering an unfinished product, so I decided to throw in some extra lines of code to make the Humidity sensor readings accessible as well. After some ‘research’ (I’m not a Homeseer user, you know) I found out how to do this, and also found a way to get Humidity readings into HSTouch (with the help of that same beta volunteer who tested my findings). Below a HSTouch screenshot, including the humidity:

Another project finished, still dozens to go!

Now that last one is a bit strange; do I see a USB connector there?? It sure looks like it; but since this Thermostat isn’t mine, I’ll leave the plugging in of a USB cable to the owner; I don’t want to destroy anything… I searched the manuals, but I couldn’t find any information about this USB port.

The IMT350 series Thermostats have a nice Touchscreen, which feels good and the up- and down-buttons for setting the temperatures are responsive enough. With my NT20e I sometimes had the problem that I clicked the buttons too often cause the Thermostat didn’t react fast enough; that’s gone now. The bottom row of buttons seem to react a bit slower though. Please don’t think I’m reviewing this Thermostat; I’m just telling my experiences I’ve had with it for a very short period; not long enough to be precise and conclusive. One thing surprised me was that the Thermostat takes more than 2 minutes to boot; that’s rather long, if you ask me. For the rest: this thermostat definitely looks much better compared to the NT20e, but still, I wouldn’t call this an “eye-catcher” in my house…

OK, let’s do some research on this IMT350! Connecting the Thermostat to my network was easy; the thermostat has DHCP so after connecting an Ethernet cable to the EPA-20 (Ethernet Power Adapter) and plugging the power adapter into a wall socket, I could start using the web-interface right away. I entered the factory set username and password and there it was. Time to start my own Domotica system and see if I can use this Thermostat; nope. I immediately got an exception on the first login attempt: HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required. Somehow I couldn’t authenticate, so I started Wireshark and looked at the conversation:

GET /get?....... HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Host: 192.168.10.155
Accept: text/html, */*
Accept-Encoding: identity
User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)
Authorization: Basic YCRWaS43YDRTaX4=

HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:36:20 GMT
Server: Cherokee/0.99.37 (UNIX)
WWW-Authenticate: Digest realm="proliphixrealm", nonce="0572700e162cb40274041d07e8b87252", qop="auth", algorithm="MD5"
Content-Length: 450
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache

Aah… Digest Authentication instead of Basic… Since I’m using Borland Delphi 2005 with Indy 10, I first had to partially finish the Digest Authentication code of Indy 10, cause it didn’t work.

After that, I could authenticate and communicate with the IMT350 just like I do with my NT20e. That’s it… all the information that I’m used to retrieve from my NT20e, came out the same way with this IMT350!

Wow, that was easy

Next step, the Homeseer Proliphix Plugin. Adding Digest Authentication to VB.NET was even simpler:

Done! Launching Homeseer and configuring a new Thermostat was all that had to be done. When the Proliphix PlugIn starts up, it recognizes a potential HTTP 401 error and if this error does occur, the Plugin will retry with Digest authentication, so that both series (NT and IMT) can be supported at the same time. Here’s the result:

Homeseer Proliphix Plugin with IMT350 and NT20

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.