rmiles7721

Happy Anniversary Shadowscope!

rmiles7721December 13, 2019Site News

Apparently I missed it. Shows how much I care 🙂

At some point in October or November of 1999 I converted over from a BBS to a web site. Ran it using a dynamic dns url for about a year and purchased shadowscope.com in December of 1999 (I think)

My first couple of months were hand coded entries and at the time I mainly posted about BBS news and Windows customization. Unfortunately since I was handcoding I would just delete the old ones and post over the top so the oldest stuff I have online is from November of 1999. I managed to recover those from the Wayback machine a few years ago and insert into my blog.

I’ve met some awesome people over the last 30 years of being online through BBSing and blogging so here’s to another couple of decades!

Some BBS Updates

rmiles7721November 30, 2019Site News

Wow. 2019. Looks like I haven’t posted since 2017. Time flies right?

Anyway, you can access still access the BBS from the menu links above by choosing the ftelnet option. I have also got a small applet hosted at shadowscope.noip.us, as Mystic now has a builtin web server.

I am in the process of adding SSH, SMTP and POP3 to the BBS. The POP3 support is only currently for local BBS mail for the time being. I have not yet tested out SSH to see how ansi support is. Only SSH client I have ever used is puTTY and I have no idea how that will look.

I can’t find very much information about the html support that was added to Mystic so not yet sure what I will be able to do. One of the very few things I miss from Synchronet (and EleBBS before that) is being able to get to my netmail and echomail from the web. I work so much and spend so much time on my phone that it would be very convenient to access it from there. I have tried a couple of android fidonet apps a couple of years back and for what I want they really didn’t work very well. Not well written, fonts too small, crash continuously, etc.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to get on and post more HA and BBS stuff than I have been the last two years. The site is coming up on 20 years old now so wow. Christmas I will have had this domain for two decades.

How to Control the Xiaomi Mi Vacuum from HomeSeer

rmiles7721October 1, 20172Home Automation

Back about a decade ago we had a Roomba I had received while doing the payperpost . The wife and I liked it and it did a pretty good job. It eventually died as electronics do and I wasn’t able to resurrect it. Eventually it went to the dump. Rather than replace it we just got a normal vacuum. The price of iRobot’s stuff is prohibitive and very much a luxury. A few weeks back I received an email from Gearbest and went to check it out. One of the things on sales was a Xiaomi Mi Vacuum. An extremely good deal so I went ahead and picked it up.

I finally received the vacuum a few days ago. Everything in Chinese, instructions, the voice (it has a built-in speaker), everything. It didn’t take me very long to figure out how to get it working though. The app lets you choose the language you are going to use so that made it a bit easier. I had not planned on doing a write-up of it so if I leave out steps or get something out of order, tough shit.

Since this thing could be controlled via Android remotely I knew that in theory I should be able to control it from Homeseer (my home automation software) with some work. I came across some python scripts and saw that you could control it via Home Assistant (another, free HA software). This “tutorial” is not the only way to do this and there are probably simpler ways to do it in less steps but you have to remember, I am not a coder at all and some of that shit just blows my mind when I look at it.

Anyway, here are the steps I took as best I can remember.

    1. First thing I did was to download the Mi Home app from the play store and set it up. I originally picked the U.S. server during set up but it really didn’t provide a lot of options. After a bit of reading I changed that to the mainland China server which gave me complete control over the vacuum.
    2. Set up Home Assistant. There are only a few things I can’t already control from Homeseer and I also wanted a way to integrate them all so HASS seemed to be the best way to do that. I already have a Raspberry Pi running NodeRED and MQTT for location tracking so figured I would be able to communicate between Homeseer and HASS that way.
    3. Follow the directions here to get control of the vacuum  from HASS. The hardest part is retrieving the access token for the vacuum. You need to be comfortable using the commandline and ADB in order to do so. If you have something other than an Android phone I don’t know any other way to do it. If you have a rooted phone (I don’t) the instructions seem to be even easier. Read through the entire page first before you start following their directions.
    4. The vacuum shows up as a switch on the main HASS page as below. 
    5. In Home Assistant’s configuration.yaml uncomment and set the http api password (near the top of the file).
    6. I seem to be having issues with MQTT and being able to control things back and forth from Homeseer to HASS without using eventghost so I chose to go with a more direct route. It doesn’t offer status updates back to Homeseer unfortunately but it does give me control and uses the HASS api which is why I set the password in step 5 and uses Curl. If you are running HS on a linux PC or raspberry pi Curl is already there. If you run under Windows then download it.  Here is my commandline:  c:\apps\curl.exe -X POST -H “x-ha-access: PASSWORD” http://192.168.86.65:8123/api/services/vacuum/turn_on or /turn_off
    7. In Homeseer create a virtual device called “vacuum” or whatever you want. I made sure to leave the voice control box checked on this.
    8. Create two events. One that triggers when the virtual device turns on and another when it turns off. For the action, choose Run Another Program or Process, browse to Curl and enter the command line parameters above. The turn_on parameter starts the vacuum in cleaning mode and turn_off directs it to go back to the dock.
    9. If you use Alexa, run discovery. Since I left the Voice Control box checked during my virtual device setup Alexa found it and now I can say “Alexa, turn on the vacuum” to start it!

 

I still have several things to do. During my initial setup of the app I set up a schedule for the floor to be cleaned twice a day. I need to remove that and create a scheduled event in Homeseer. This allows for local control and doesn’t depend on control from a server in mainland China. As a matter of fact it’s probably a good idea to block any IPs from China at your router if you have any sort of IOT devices.

I also need to figure out why I can’t just control my Homeseer devices via MQTT. I can send commands from Homeseer to Eventghost and NodeRED but don’t yet know how to trigger HASS switches and other devices via MQTT. Also any MQTT commands that Homeseer receives don’t seem to trigger devices. I have to intercept them in Eventghost and use a Homeseer event to get them working.

Short downtime

rmiles7721July 23, 2017Site News

My BBS and corresponding internal web site will be down for a while this afternoon as I change my network over. Should be back up in the next couple of hours.

Updated – The BBS itself should be available now as well as the Fidonet mailer. If there’s any issues please let me know. Best way is to shoot me an email.

BBS Guest Access

rmiles7721July 6, 2017BBS

For the time being I have disabled the Guest account on the BBS. In order to access it from here (or via Telnet) you’ll need to spend the extra 30 seconds and set up an account. Bear in mind that accounts without a valid email address will be deleted. I don’t spam folks with crap but I need a way to get in touch for password resets, etc.

 

BBS Back Online

rmiles7721June 22, 2017BBS

For some reason the port forwarding stopped working on my router recently. I’ve temporarily fixed the problem so you should be able to get back in.  Sorry about that.

Also, I haven’t been on myself in several weeks so if you have attempted to contact me and I haven’t answered that is why. I’ll log in tonight and respond to everyone. As always, the easiest way to contact me is through email or Hangouts.

BBS Down

rmiles7721April 1, 2017Site News

My BBS and a few other internal services will be down until  tomorrow evening. My router (or at least it’s settings) has gone tits up and reset everything to default including all of my port forwarding settings. I don’t have the time or patience to mess with it tonight but will fix it as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon.

Looking through the logs this was apparently the result of a pretty heavy DoS attack.

Wizards of the Coast to Release Digital Toolset

rmiles7721March 14, 2017Site News

Growing up I played Dungeons and Dragons extensively. The original D&D, Advanced D&D, 3rd Edition, you name it. Really from about 1976 up until the early 90s I was a big fan. Still have most of the books, boxed sets, modules, dice and a crapload of full notebooks where I created my own stuff.

Anyway, that’s what it was all about. Pen & Pencil. Even just getting ready to set up a new campaign took a lot of preparation before you could even begin.

While I haven’t played in years I still occasionally follow news of the game. RPGs are using new technology to help improve game play and make it a little easier and Wizards of the Coast is attempting to join the club by creating D&D Beyond, a new digital toolset to be used with Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.

D&D Beyond is being built in partnership with Curse and provides players and DMs with a rules compendium, character builder, character sheets, item listings and more.

Back in 2014 they attempted to release a tool called Dungeonscape and that ended up falling through.

D&D Beyond isn’t ready for a full release yet but if you want to sign up to beta test it once they are ready you can check it out here.

Five Free Home Automation Tools

rmiles7721March 14, 2017Home Automation

So you’ve spent all your money on a crapload of smarthome devices and don’t have anything else to spend on software, or you just like tinkering with stuff and discovering how and why they work, or maybe you’re just a fan of not supporting developers for their hard work and want something for free. Actually that was sort of snide. There are plenty of people that support developers but also like open source software, myself included. Any way you look at it we’ve got you covered.

Here’s a short list of free and/or open source home automation software.

First off is Eventghost. Eventghost is not actually strictly HA software and was not designed for that. What is it then? EG is a Windows based automation tool. It can use different input controls such as infrared, wireless remotes, game controllers, keyboards or input from remote devices to trigger macros. It could be used to control a media center computer but it’s also possible to use for a hell of a lot more than that.

My personal use is sort of as a middle man. There is an Eventghost plugin for HomeSeer that I use for the two to communicate. I also use the MQTT protocol for the same thing. I set up some of the cheap Chinese miLight LED light strips in my kitchen. For some reason the app I use with it won’t communicate with the Wifi hub so I set it up on my personal PC and let EG make sure it’s constantly running. I also have an old Snapstream Firefly remote set up and Eventghost intercepts those commands and forwards them to my FireTV as well as to Homeseer. I also use it with Tasker and Autoremote so that I can control my PC remotely if needed. That’s currently about it. I used to use a convoluted system of macros so that Homeseer would know exactly which HDMI input was on and turn on/off the correct virtual devices via my Globalcache IR devices. Currently that is disabled until I have time to really work out how I want it set up.

Anyway, it supports just about any type of PC connected remote receiver you can think of, tons of built-in program controls as well as hardware via serial port, over Ethernet and USB. For a semi-complete listing you can check out this list.

 

Domoticz is an HA system with support for quite a few devices and additional support for 3rd party integrations. It was designed with an HTML5 front end so can be accessed via desktop and mobile. It’s pretty lightweight as well and can run on the Raspberry Pi  as well as OSX, Windows and Linux. The source code is available on GitHub and is released under the GPLv3.

Home Assistant is available on GitHub and is released under an MIT license. It can be run on anything that will handle Python 3. It supports quite a few commercial and open source devices and hubs and also allows you to integrate with Alexa and IFTTT. I’ve been toying with the idea of running HomeAssistant as another secondary (tertiary I suppose) controller in addition to HomeSeer just because of the amount of stuff it supports and will control. I’m only really familiar with Python 2 but I do know that 2 and 3 can run concurrently from what I understand.

OpenHAB is popular among open source folks that are into HA. There is a large support community and it’s written in Java so will run on just about anything, including the Pi. It supports hundreds of devices and software and also has Android and iOS apps. OpenHAB’s source is on GitHub and is released under the Eclipse Public License.

Open Source Automation is the last one we’re looking at today. I’m not very familiar with OSA yet but it looks promising. It runs on Windows only and doesn’t appear to be open source, only free. There seems to be a wide range of plugins and more in development.

Do you use any of these or something else? There several other free programs available, some of which have been around for a long time as well.

Today’s Home Automation Deals

rmiles7721March 13, 2017Home Automation

Funny that I wrote about these earlier but Homecontrols is currently having a sale on a few items including Vera. You can pick up the VeraEdge for $69.95 and the VeraPlus for $119.95. That’s a $30 savings over Amazon’s price for the plus. The Zipato Z-Wave RGBW LED Light Bulb is on sale for $39 (that’s $20 off) and there are a couple of other items as well.

HomeSeer also has some items on sale as well, mainly open box and refurbished items. I shop there and have purchased several open box items without any issues. Looks like they currently have about 20 items on clearance including a couple of Global Cache products that I really want. Just not the right time to be spending money considering my upcoming trip.

Smarthome  also has some decent deals as well. I’ve used them in the past but not in the last few years. Never had any problems with them either. The carry quite a bit of Insteon products, which makes sense as the parent company for both is Smartlabs. The Smarthome store isn’t limited to their own products however, and they usually have a pretty large inventory.