Difference between revisions of "Wizard Pages"

Revision as of 22:37, 16 September 2007

The Wizard is designed to be a quick and simple way to setup your whole LinuxMCE system. To use it, just go to the LinuxMCE Admin web site, and click "Wizard". Then go through each of the pages and fill out the information on each page. Be sure to click "Save" or "Update" to save the changes you make to each page before going to the next. Every page in the Wizard section is designed to be simple for the non-techie. There may be some other, more advanced pages that are more technical.

What pages you see in your Wizard will depend on what devices you have in your home--you will only see pages that apply to your home. If you add more devices later on, more pages may appear in the wizard for those devices.

Setting up your LinuxMCE system consists of 4 things:

1) Providing some general information, such as what kind of network you have.

2) Creating the devices (lights, tv's, cameras, etc.).

3) Creating your scenarios. A "scenario" is a group of commands, or tasks, you want executed when you touch a button. Each scenario you create will appear on the Orbiters as a button. Scenarios are generally organized into 5 categories: lighting, media, climate, security and telephone. You can create, for example, a lighting scenario called "Entertaining" which turns on all the lights in the house and in the front yard. A button labeled "Entertaining" will then appear on the Orbiters in the lighting section--touch it to activate the scenario. Any scenario can do anything. For example, just because the "Entertaining" scenario is a lighting scenario doesn't mean the scenario only affects lights. You can make the scenario also play some music, and maybe open the front gate. You can use the "Advanced, My Scenarios" menu option for low-level control over a scenario, to make it do whatever you want. However the Wizard includes pages that make it very easy to create scenarios. For example, when you add a lighting scenario with the Wizard, it lists all the lights in the house and lets you pick the ones you want to change with the scenario.

4) Creating event handlers. This is how you tell LinuxMCE you want it to do something in response to some event. For example, you want LinuxMCE to turn on the Front Porch light when a motion detector is tripped. Or you want it to play a loud message on the TV's when there is a security breach. Or stop watering the lawn after it rains.