Firstly, this is for Linux based systems (Zee and Full Linux install).
Problem: The HS log is a small Sqlite3 database and monitoring it involves a web browser, that then activates a back end program that then sends a request to the database, gets the data and then updates a display. This process is slow and resource intensive.
Solution: Use Conky to parse the log and display the most recent events as part of your home automation server's desktop.
The Conky configuration file:
Conky looks for configuration files in /home/$home/.conky (my user is 'jervin', so this expands to /home/jervin/.conky). The Conky configuration file directory states with a "." which simply means it is hidden. Many Linux/Unix programs store configuration in formation in directories in the user's home directory, naming the directory with a starting ".".
The code above is saved as /home/$home/.conky/HomeSeer/HomeSeer - though "where" it is and what it is called is moot as long as you point to it when you run Conky.
(a file called HomeSeer in a directory called HomeSeer in the Conky setting directory)
You can run this with conky (installed by default in most distros) with:
The "&" simply tells the process to fork to the background.
The end result is:
This is accomplished via a single line of code that gets the ten most recent entries from the database, strips the HTML formatting that HS uses and replaces it with Conky formatting.
It only pulls the most recent ten entries. If you want more or less, you can alter "DESC LIMIT 10" to your desired limit.
The update frequency is 2 seconds, but you can change that in the configuration file.
Though it only opens the database in read mode, it will still lock the database and you may see one or two instances a day of HomeSeer complaining that the database is locked.
I addressed that by converting the database to WAL access mode. https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html This is not required and I don't recommend it as I am still testing to see if HS objects to a change in the database. So far it appears to not care or even realize the change was made and it should be transparent to clients.
So, if you have a dedicated home automation server and want to have simple access to your log, you can use Conky to have a display always handy.
Problem: The HS log is a small Sqlite3 database and monitoring it involves a web browser, that then activates a back end program that then sends a request to the database, gets the data and then updates a display. This process is slow and resource intensive.
Solution: Use Conky to parse the log and display the most recent events as part of your home automation server's desktop.
The Conky configuration file:
Code:
# **********************************************************************
# HomeSeer Conky config File
# jervin@gmail.com
# **********************************************************************
background yes
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 399 193
maximum_width 850
alignment top_left
border_width 1
default_color white
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
gap_x 30
gap_y 40
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
out_to_stderr no
extra_newline no
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_colour 000000
own_window_argb_visual no
own_window_argb_value 0
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
stippled_borders 0
update_interval 2.0
uppercase no
use_spacer none
show_graph_scale no
show_graph_range no
use_xft yes
xftalpha 0.1
xftfont Droid Sans:size=10
color0 white
color1 EAEAEA
color2 FFA300
color3 grey
TEXT
${color2}${font bold:size=16}HomeSeer ${font size=8}${color0}
${alignr}${execp /usr/bin/sqlite3 /opt/HomeSeer/Logs/HomeSeerLog.hsd 'SELECT Log_DateTime, Log_Type, Log_Entry FROM Log ORDER BY Log_DateTime DESC LIMIT 10' | sed -e 's/<font color=..\([0-9]*\).>/${color #\1} /g' -e 's/<.font>/${color0}/g'
The code above is saved as /home/$home/.conky/HomeSeer/HomeSeer - though "where" it is and what it is called is moot as long as you point to it when you run Conky.
(a file called HomeSeer in a directory called HomeSeer in the Conky setting directory)
You can run this with conky (installed by default in most distros) with:
Code:
conky -c "/home/jervin/.conky/HomeSeer/HomeSeer" &
The end result is:
This is accomplished via a single line of code that gets the ten most recent entries from the database, strips the HTML formatting that HS uses and replaces it with Conky formatting.
It only pulls the most recent ten entries. If you want more or less, you can alter "DESC LIMIT 10" to your desired limit.
The update frequency is 2 seconds, but you can change that in the configuration file.
Though it only opens the database in read mode, it will still lock the database and you may see one or two instances a day of HomeSeer complaining that the database is locked.
I addressed that by converting the database to WAL access mode. https://www.sqlite.org/wal.html This is not required and I don't recommend it as I am still testing to see if HS objects to a change in the database. So far it appears to not care or even realize the change was made and it should be transparent to clients.
Code:
root@MiniUntu:/opt/HomeSeer/Logs# sqlite3 ./HomeSeerLog.hsd SQLite version 3.22.0 2018-01-22 18:45:57 Enter ".help" for usage hints. sqlite> PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;
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