Revision as of 01:05, 20 June 2008

How to set it up

Create floorplans for your house using a paint program. Make them roughly square around 1,200 x 1,200 pixels--it can be smaller but then OrbiterGen will have to stretch them for high-res displays and they may not look as good. Save them as jpg or png. You can have as many floorplans as you want. For a big house you could create one floorplan that includes the whole house, called "Overview" on which you place only major objects, and then close-up floorplans like "North wing" for more detail. There are no limits or rules. Then in LinuxMCE Admin go to Wizard, Devices, Floorplan Wizard. Click "Add floorplan" and add all the floorplans using the 'browse' button to pick the images. Then use the 2 pull-downs on the floorplan wizard to pick a floorplan, and a type (Lighting, Climate, etc.). Lights, blinds and drapes appear on the Lighting floorplan. Heaters, air conditioners, pool, jacuzzi and sprinklers appear on the Climate floorplan. Drag and drop the devices to indicate their position on the floorplans. To remove a device from a floorplan, drag it back off the floorplan. Note that what icon appears to represent the device is chosen on the Wizard, Devices, Lights/Climate pages in the Floorplan Object Type pulldown. You will need Regen the orbiters UI on Wizard, Devices, Orbiters to see the floorplans.

How to use it

Choose one of the floorplan buttons from any Orbiter. There are: Lighting, Media, Climate, Telecom and Security floorplans. With the standard UI and skin, these will be the five buttons on the left side of the Orbiter's main menu. When the floorplan appears you can select another floorplan, or view you want, like "Overview" and "North wing" in our example. You will see all the devices as you laid them out when you set it up. Touch any device to see a pop-up with the commands you can send the device, such as "On", "Off", "50%", etc.

You can touch other devices to select them too. Then touching a command, like On, will send that command to all the devices. If you touch the same device again you will toggle through the selections of all the "Device Groups" that device belongs to, and finally un-select the device. For example, let's assume you have a light "Front Porch". You create a Device Group in LinuxMCE Admin called "Outdoor devices" which includes all outdoor devices, like the pool and all outdoor lights. You create another device group called "Front yard Lights" that has just the lights in the front yard. This light, "Front Porch", is a member of both groups. So the first time you touch the "Front Porch" on the floorplan it will be selected alone. The second time all other lights in the group "Outdoor devices" will be selected. The third time all lights in the group "Front yard Lights". The fourth time nothing will be selected. This allows you to create groups containing many devices you normally control all at once so you don't need to select them one at a time on the floorplan.

Programmer's guide