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Remote control, 24/24h, under all circumstances via Google pubsub

For my home alarm system, I defined the following important requirements: It should be possible to contact and control remotely (e.g. turn off/on the alarm while not at home) the system. The latency for reacting to remote control commands should be as fast as possible (e.g. not more than 1-2 seconds). And there I go, starting to implement the security of my home service HTTP endpoints... configuring the Ruby Sinatra framework to use SSL , to have basic HTTP authentication... setting up port forwarding on the home gateway... That sounds ok, works ok, until thinking about using a "backup network"; what I have always foreseen in my home alarm system, is to use an external WiFi external access-point as fallback when my home gateway network is down; nowadays it is indeed easy and common to use your ISP special WiFi access points, available everywhere in the country. A quick scan around shows already 3 of these access points in the neighbourhood (one of course being linked
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Time for an upgrade, and an update too...

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I have been waiting for a long time to get myself one these Raspberry Pi cameras. From the beginning I wanted to experiment with a camera, movement detection, making some time-lapse videos... Unfortunately when I tried initially with my good old Logitech 4400 webcam, it did not work so well. Something was wrong with the USB driver? Not clear, but at the end I never managed to get it working well. Recently, well a few months ago already, the 2nd big version of the Raspberry Pi got out. The perfect opportunity to get an upgrade for my existing system. The camera is nice: simple setup, works out of the box. The  documentation  is great and better, the default distribution (Raspian) got all these nice shell command lines to control the camera. This opens a bunch of new ideas, things to try out in the future :-) The "old" Raspberry Pi is still running, my home "alarm/surveillance" system (still based on my  Ruby ZWay wrapper library , that I update and improve -
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rzwaveway: controlling a siren & strobe alarm

Finally "back to work" and trying to finalize a first fully working version of my home alarm system... I am now looking at how to use my alarm device, a " FortrezZ strobe and alarm " ZWave device. I added a small extension to the rzwaveway library for that matter. It is a simple interface for controlling the state of the alarm and enabling or disabling the strobe light and siren. zway = RZWaveWay::ZWay.instance zway.setup(hostname) zway.start device = RZWaveWay::Extensions::SSASirenStrobeAlarm.new(device_id) device.enable_strobe sleep 5 device.enable_siren sleep 5 device.disable Unfortunately it seems that the "SetWithDuration" function of the SwitchMultiLevel command class does not work (at least from the Z-Wave Me web UI). I guess it would have helped to implement a "pre-alarm warning" (e.g. some short bips to notify when the alarm is armed). The best solution I could find so far to
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ZWave: window/door sensors

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The first ZWave devices I bought one year ago were window/door sensors. I started with 3x Everspring SM 103 sensors as I got a bulk price for them. Initially everything worked fine, until a few months: One sensor, attached to a window, suddenly stopped communicating with the controller; changed the batteries, re-included into the network, did a reset, but still the same. Even at 30 cm from the controller, sometimes it takes a few seconds (to a minute) to wake up and send an event. Weirdly after it wake up a first time, it seems to work fine for a few... but after some time, it "lags" again. Finally, I replaced it with the "test" spare sensor I had. Second sensor, the door sensor... Ok, that one was badly treated: since the base was too big to be installed next to the door, I installed the base on the door and the magnet on the side. Clearly a bad idea. This probably did not help. Recently this one also started to "miss" wake ups, but worse, it also mi
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rzwaveway: calling ZWave commands

Still working on the Ruby [ dark ] side (although I wish I had more time and motivation to go on with my C++ :-)),... I finally implemented something that makes it possible to "invoke" ZWave command class functions on devices. In Ruby life is easy and this was implemented quite easily: after all, calling a function in ZWay ends up being just a simple HTTP call. In my little rzwaveway  library gem I added the notion of "extensions" ("plug-ins" would have been a good name too) that define a clear API (meaning, not a low-level ZWay function call) for a known ZWave device interface. As a first test, I implemented support for the ZWave siren/strobe alarm device I bought earlier this year. The code for it looks like this: module RZWaveWay module Extensions class SSASirenStrobeAlarm include CommandClasses def initialize(device_id) @device_id = device_id end def disable set_value(0) end def enable
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4 weeks with Ruby

The past month brought a bunch of changes in my developer carrier. Change of job team, office, city... and technologies. One of these was to start learning a new language for developing software: Ruby! It is quite a change from the programming languages I went through before (in short, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Assemblers, Java, C#). I was advised a very good Ruby book,  Eloquent Ruby  and some fancy "training exercises", the " Ruby Koans " to start learning about Ruby. After a few days I realized that a better exercise for me would be to re-implement my "home zwave proxy" (developer in C++, using directly the ZWay C library); and well, it was a good idea. After 4 weeks (well, a few hours in the evenings), with some basic knowledge of Ruby, I almost managed to reach the same "level of functionality" as my native C++ application. "Almost", because there is definitively something I miss in this fancy Ruby world: real callbacks on event
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ZWay: new ZWave devices!

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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...
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