Introduction
If you are reading this, you probably installed my plugin (or you are interested in doing so). Great! Thank you so much for giving it a shot.
Since the store page has a character limit, let me start this guide by writing a few words about what brought this piece of software into being, and what this plugin is all about:
I've long thought the biggest weakness of HS is that it does not have a rational or usable UI for daily use. Sure, you can automate your stuff until you don't have to push buttons in your home ever again, but if you're anything like me, you run into a couple of snags:
Of course, you are free to be as creative as you want with this as you'd like. Instead of an architectural sketch you could upload anything at all in place of a floor plan, really.
The most basic use-case, step by step
So, you've installed the plugin, and you want to know how to use it. Here's how to get started:
If you are reading this, you probably installed my plugin (or you are interested in doing so). Great! Thank you so much for giving it a shot.
Since the store page has a character limit, let me start this guide by writing a few words about what brought this piece of software into being, and what this plugin is all about:
I've long thought the biggest weakness of HS is that it does not have a rational or usable UI for daily use. Sure, you can automate your stuff until you don't have to push buttons in your home ever again, but if you're anything like me, you run into a couple of snags:
- You figure you'll automate it all and remove the wall switches for your lights. Your home is now app-only. Your only choice for an app is HStouch, which is better, but...
- You don't have the exact same day every day and your timed events get annoying
- You install sensors to trigger events instead, which are subsequently messed with by your cat
- You start fantasizing about using machine learning to predict your own behaviour to better trigger events (okay, maybe this one is not as common)
- 100% configurable in almost every way
- Minimal clicking to shut something on/off, preferably one click
- Capable of running on "any" device
Of course, you are free to be as creative as you want with this as you'd like. Instead of an architectural sketch you could upload anything at all in place of a floor plan, really.
The most basic use-case, step by step
So, you've installed the plugin, and you want to know how to use it. Here's how to get started:
- Draw a rough sketch of your home in ANY graphics tool. The point of this tutorial is to get started, after all. Save it as a PNG or JPEG. The file size is somewhat important, as HomeSeer as a platform does not seem to appreciate very large files (try to keep it below 2MB but feel free to experiment.)
- You need to make/supply icons to represent your devices, in all states (lights in multiple dimming states, open/closed windows, heater temperatures, etc). I've attached a zip file containing some light bulbs I use to represent my lights. Feel free to use them.
- Navigate to the HomeSeer web user interface. Plugins -> Installed. Make sure Simmap is enabled.
- Navigate to Plugins -> Simmap -> Image Uploader. Here, you upload you floor plan and icons. Enter a unique name for your floor plan, level 0, and upload the image. Click "Add the Icon". Your floor plan should now appear on the page.
- On the same page, write "bulb" as a name, for instance, and start uploading bulbs of various light levels, all with the same name. It is worth mentioning here that depending on the devices in your home, what level the device considers "on" and "off" varies depending on manufacturer and is found either through your own experimentation or consulting the device documentation. The devices in my home almost exclusively consider "0" to be off and "99" to be on. This seems to be true for my Fibaro Dimmers and Switches, but my Fibaro RGBW devices run from 0 to 254. Thus, the icons you upload should have "levels" in the range your device supports in order to properly show the current state of the device in the finished controller. Don't worry if you make mistakes here: Everything can be revisited!
- When you have gotten this far, it's over to the fun part. Navigate to Plugins ->Simmap -> House Designer. Pick a name for your design. It doesn't matter at this point, but naming it is nice for future functionality of this plugin. Select your floor plan image as the floor plan. It should show up below everything on screen. In the "Select an icon" selector, select the bulb image set.
- Click the "Add an icon" button. A bulb shows up on your floor plan. Drag it to where you want it to be. Click it. A settings box should appear. Here's the finicky part. I'll explain each element in the box here:
- Topmost selector: The device to control using this icon. Select the one you want from the dropdown.
- View: The feature of the device to use when showing the current state of the device. For lights, it's usually named "Multivalue Switch 1" for instance, for thermostats, it's "Temperature
- Control: The feature of the device used to control it. For lights, it's usually the same feature you used in "view", for thermostats it's "Temperature Set" or similar.
- Control Widget: This system allows you to right click or long press an icon to bring up a dialog where you can set the exact value of a device. Right now, you can pick "Slider" or "none". The other options do not currently do anything. The slider is rather self explanatory and the "none" option disables the dialog box altogether (let's vote over what you want me to implement next!)
- Scale slider to 0-100: The slider can either show the true value of the devices or show a number between min and max as a percentage. Check it if your device does not have 100 as its max value
- Tap to toggle: Checking this allows you to tap/click the icons in the remote control to toggle them between on and off
- Min/Max value: Pretty self explanatory at this point. I suggest reading the manual for your devices or experimenting. If the Homeseer Devs reveal to me in the future that there is a way for me to detect what the min/max values of a device is, I will implement that and remove these two inputs.
- Click the icon you are editing to dismiss the settings box. Now, click the "Add an Icon" button again if you want to add another icon and repeat step 7 for this icon.
- Once you are done, click Save.
- Click Plugins -> Simmap -> House Controller. This page should look exactly the same as your House Designer. The exception being of course that this page lacks all the options for adding more icons or changing anything. You probably want to bookmark this page, run it on a tablet glued to the wall, you name it. Click your icons; Verify that devices turn on/off, right click them, verify that you can set specific values. Verify that the icon representation on the page accurately reflects the actual dimming state of your device. If devices turn off but not on when clicking, your max value is probably wrong. Try a max of 254 or 99.
- Have fun with it!
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