Yet Another Developer Blog

Right, it was about time to invest into some new ZWave devices for my home. Christmas being over....... I finally made up my mind and ordered: A smoke sensor: Fibaro FGSS-001. A wireless siren & strobe alarm: FortrezZ SSA1 So far I managed to include the smoke sensor device; the ZWay configuration screen were initially not right and I had to update the ZDDX definitions in order to get it right: it was missing the XML file for this brand new device: " 500-010f-0c00-1000-03-03-34-02-01.xml " (note that there is a nice ZWave device database here ). For that matter, I discovered that there is a script meant for that purpose: "/opt/z-way-server/ZDDX/UpdateXMLs.sh" I did not install yet the alarm device; too risky :-) My C++ Razberry proxy software needs some rework and device abstractions first...

Until now, my "Home server" Google application (running in the cloud :-)) was using basic XMPP for sending sensor notifications to my phone. With that, each time a sensor changed status, a small text message was sent to me, appearing in my Google Talk application, telling me what sensor changed, the time etc. Easy, simple, very basic: a few lines of code, done. Even an event history for free! However this basic solution started to be annoying: No easy way to integrate the notifications with my "Client" Android application. Impossible to use this if the Android Google Talk application got upgraded to "Hangouts": I tried and indeed, I never got a single message when using Hangouts. Apparently, this is a known limitation ? Luckily last month I finally discovered Google Cloud Messaging  and had a bit of time to "practice" during the holidays. In short, it makes it possible to easily received/send messages from/to an Android device; the send