Mac Home Automation

There is no beta version available at this time.

• NEW: The Video Encoder plugin will now run an Interface Script handler when a new encoding is complete. Open the Edit Interface dialog for the plugin and click to edit the Interface Script. Use the “Insert” toolbar item to add a default handler to demonstrate how it works. The handler is called “newFileAvailable” and it will pass you 2 parameters, the name of the video stream the recording came from and the full path to the new file. like: on newFileAvailable( streamName, filePath)
• NEW: If you’re using the “live recording” option for a stream then the recordings are never passed off to the batch encoder process but handled inside the video stream itself. In this case the same event in the previous item will be called in the video stream script. It is otherwise identical to the above.
• FIX: Units added to the list of shared items to the Home Kit are no longer in danger of getting an invalid Accessory ID.
• If you have Units that do not reload properly with this build as they were too broken before use the new trouble shooting functions now included in the Troubleshooting section of the Home Kit Documentation.

• NEW: Direct support for ESPresence in the MQTT plugin. Simplifies using ESPresence devices with the MQTT plugin without having to do a lot of scripting. Turn it on in the Edit Interface dialog for the plugin and at least initially you should leave the Automatically Create Units for it turned on until it’s setup to your satisfaction. Full Documentation is coming but for the moment here. The ESPresence support will find all the devices that have been seen on your receivers, by devices I mean the bluetooth beacons and things like iPhones and the like, not the physical ESP32 devices running the receiver software. Each device will get a master device unit in one list in XTension. This will have the presence/absence of the device anywhere on your system. If no update has been received for it by the timeout set in the edit unit dialog then it will get turned off. While turned on the default label for the Unit will be the name of the room that the device is in. In addition to that another list of location units are created. For each device another unit is created for each room they may be in. These Units will turn on and off based on regularly walking the list of recently received messages and finding the one with the shortest distance to the receiver. I’m not 100% sure about this logic or layout or anything else yet so please let me know if this is the kind of thing you’d expect from this or not. More direct device support is coming. I’m working on Tasmota next as it also has a rather complex MQTT topic structure. NOTE if you enable the ESPresence support while the plugin is running you’ll need to disable and re-enable the plugin for that to take effect.
• NEW: If there are important errors during startup a new list window will open to contain them separate from the log. This window is called the “Startup Messages” window. If you see it then there is something you might need to address. It will either contain the necessary information or suggest you look at the log for more info. This way messages on database load that might get scrolled off the top so fast you don’t see them will get noticed more easily.
• NEW: Multiple Interface Collision Detection. Previously it was possible to create a situation where a unit was set to use 2 interfaces to receive, but one of them could have another unit with the same address which would keep the multiple interfaces from working properly. During startup if this is seen while loading the database an error is written to the log and a startup message is created in the above mentioned window telling you that it has happened and what the 2 units are so you can more easily figure out why messages aren’t getting routed as you expect.
• NEW: MQTT Plugin now better handles server reconnects. If the server drops out due to network issues or rebooting or whatever and then recovers all your existing subscribed units will re-subscribe and continue to receive data.
• NEW: MQTT Plugin now has a separate field for the outgoing topic. If updates from the Unit need to be published to a different topic than the one subscribed to for updates from the mqtt server that can now be entered there.
• NEW: MQTT Plugin now lets you set the QOS and Retain values for each individual Unit in the Unit Setup Dialog.
• NEW: MQTT Plugin implements a generic scripting handler just called “publish()” that lets you publish any string to any topic from anywhere. If you’re doing it from the Unit’s on or off script no other handling is needed it’s just:publish( “/my/topic”, “shower in use”) if you’re doing it from elsewhere use the tell xInterface “name of your MQTT plugin” to publish( “/my/topic”, “shower in use”)
• NEW: The Video plugins now insert all the event data that you create while recording with the record from “whatever” for 30 info “name the event here!” as well as the timestamp of the frame into closed caption data. This can be displayed when streaming the snippet from the web interface or when just viewing it off the disk. It is superior to physically overlaying the text onto the actual video stream as it can be moved around by the user so that it doesn’t obscure something you want to see and it is readable and the same size no matter how small a thumbnail of the video you’re looking at.
• NEW: The video plugins now provide the same event listing in the Web Interfaces that the old Video Pitcher program did. So they will show up there as well as closed captioned.
• FIX: Fixed a problem with the MJPEG camera streaming plugin that would cause a slight bump in CPU usage every time the connection was lost and recovered due to it not properly closing a thread that would keep trying to work in the background even after it had been replaced.
• FIX: Fixed an issue with the Amcrest API camera plugin that would cause the plugin CPU usage to peg at 100% if the camera connection was lost.
• FIX: Fixed a rare and unusual problem with syncing data between XTension and the plugins. This could have caused the loading of units from XTension to be short circuited and some updates to be lost to the plugin.
• FIX: The logging of available RAM that XTension does at startup was logging it with the wrong suffix showing that you only had kb available when it was really mb or gb.
• FIX: I’ve made it possible to change the type of a Unit while the interface it’s connected to is running. This is working well in my testing but it is possible that there are situations in some plugins that would not properly follow along. If you have any trouble doing this record the errors to send to me and then just disable and re-enable the interface to get everything working properly again.
• CHANGE: This shouldn’t affect anything, but keep an eye out in case it does. Plugins that have scripting handlers now register them with XTension. XTension will verify that a handler you’re trying to call is available before sending the command to the plugin. If you try to call a handler that does not exist then the script will be returned an error. Previously once the command was sent to the plugin it was assumed to be handled. So if you had called piblish( “topic”, “payload”) instead of publish() it would not have been able to log an error, it would just silently fail. So watch for new script errors where this might be being caught now when it was never before.

This is probably going to be the next release unless something else exciting comes up.

Change log:

• NEW MQTT Client plugin. No wiki documentation yet. Read the information on the unit pages carefully. Select how you’re going to get the data out of the topic there are currently 3 types of parsing to get it out. There will be more for more complicated devices. Then enter the MQTT Topic into that field and if the Unit is 2 way select the way you’re going to send data back to the server. There are currently many choices but none that will yet easily handle XML or JSON values or more complex structures that would require scripted parsing and scripted re-creation of such a structure. If you have examples of such things please send me the topic data from them and as much other info as you can put together so I can make sure that the release version of the plugin can handle it. To see all the topics as published turn debug mode on for the plugin instance. Note that there is no attempt to automatically create Units for an MQTT server. That would result in a LOT of Units. Create only the Units you need with the specific topic paths that you wish. Use a problem like MQTT explorer to find what they are on your server. Also note that this is NOT a broker. This is a client and can connect to a broker elsewhere or running on the same machine. I recommend the Mosquitto server at the moment since that is what I have been testing against.
• FIX data logged from a Unit using the contextual menu item of log debug data will now have the Unit set so that you can filter for that and see it in the log. Makes it easier to gather debugging information for me.
• Fixed an error in the error logging in one place in the basic plugin includes. This could have caused a confusing error and would have stopped the logging of the actual error and information that I would need to fix that. This was initially plaguing folks with the Barix plugin as it was trying to convert older Units. I have found an interface on my system that also generates this error so I will be able to fix it now, but if we were working on this please send me the new error message to help me get this squashed and properly working

Changes in the previous beta.

• NEW Plugin for No Hassle AV 4×4 HDMI switchers. Documentation is here. This supports (or tries to) 4 different 4×4 size devices.
• NEW Plugin for No Hassle AV 8×8 HDMI switchers. Documentation is here. This supports (or tries to) 3 different 8×8 size devices.
• FIX: Fixed a problem loading Unit Icon files that were not JPEGs. PNG’s and GIF’s load normally again. This was broken recently when I switched to a faster jpeg parsing library.
• FIX: more bugs in the Phillips Hue plugin that would have caused an error, and then an error in the error handling when it tried to log the wrong data.
• Database Format Change: For more than 5 years I’ve been keeping 2 copies of the Unit Properties data to make it easier should anyone have to revert to an earlier version after using the newer version. This build stops doing that and removes the old file potentially making the database quite a bit smaller and therefore faster to load and easier to manage. At this point if you need to revert to a version more than 5 years old you’ll have to use the backup file that is zipped up when each new version is loaded. Or just be OK with losing the Unit Properties from your database.
• Enumerated Values for Units are now individually trimmed of leading or trailing spaces. So if you enter the values like “slow, medium, fast” the system will know you didn’t actually mean those spaces to be part of the enumerated values.
• If a plugin has an empty description the name in the popup will no longer show an empty set of parenthesis after the name.