Mac Home Automation

XTension version 9.5.1 beta 4 is available:

https://MacHomeAutomation.com/files/xtension/xtension_9_5_1b4.dmg

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.