Somewhere there are instructions....

[dcjohnston]

After a million searches for installation instructions I have come up with some but not all. Does someone know of a link to the instructions for the setup of the hsGirder plugin? I have the Readme, the install Doc but nothing on setting up the girder app, and netremote.

Any link would be appreciated.

Where is my aspirin....

Dave

[George]

It looks like Watermans guide did not get moved over from the old board along with the ton of other stuff. Here is that latest guide that I have that Rick Fox was working on.

George
Update: Here's a good one! This is the message I just got when I tried to upload the doc file.

hsGirder Beta User Guide.zip:
File Too Large. Limit for this filetype is 585.9 KB. Your file is 593.2 KB.

Who the heck set the limit at such a weird number like 585.9KB???!!!@@@@

Let me try to break up the doc file into two files so I can upload them. It's just an MSWord doc file so you should be able to open both of them or merge them yourself.

G

[George]

Ok..

Try these files. Part 1 and Part 2 when put together will give you the guide as it currently stands. Hopefully Rick or someone will pick this back up and finish it.

George

[dcjohnston]

Great

Great to have such a useful plugin, however, given its complexity, documentation is imperative.

Thanks for the information.

[George]

Thanks,

I agree but that's one of the tradeoff's of having a free plugin vs one that is not. Also, I haven't had a ton of free time lately. hsGirder has taken off a lot more than I thought it originally would and there are probably more people using it right now than all my other paid or free plugins combined. I wish I could spend some time and do some proper documentation on it but, trust me, all the feature are in all my posts from the very beginning of beta .1. At each beta I fully documented every new feature, switch, and gizmo in it. But, you are correct, to get it all you have to go back and reread the beta postings from the beginning.

Rick started a great project to do much better documentation than I could using both text and graphics as you can see. A lot of freeware software (NetRemote was for a long time) was developed by the developer coding code and others flushing out the documentation for it. I had to shelve the next version for a little while because of personal issues but I hope to get back to it soon and get the new version of hsG out that has the subscriptions support in it. Again, I'll fully document how to use the subscriptions when I post the new plugin.

If someone can get a decent up to date copy of the docs online, what I can do is take it from there and update them when I release a new version of the plugin. But, right now, it would take more time than I can devote to go back and start full docs from scratch.

Hope everyone understands,
George

[Rick Fox]

George

I have the week off, so I will try and make some time to update the docs with some more up to date information. I will also talk with John and see if he has anything to add.

dcjohnston

Could you provide me with a little bit of insight as to what you are having difficulty with and what you are trying to do. I can then address your needs more directly in the docs. Thanks

Rick

[dcjohnston]

First let me say this is a great plugin...

I also know that everyone that uses it appreciates all of the work involved in its creation. With that said there is no reason to be apologetic.

Anyway, with a set of instructions that provide setup methods will really improve the palatability of the plugin.

What I experienced that may help in the instructions:

I am somewhat knowlegable with networking and have had girder working in the past so, I had a little background on what to expect with this plugin. So I decided to give it a go.

With no direction of any kind I thought it would be worth the attempt to start from scratch and see how far I can go before needing to reference any documentation. So I went to the updater and saw the plugin listed. I selected it and had hoped a description would show up in the updater with some general information about where to locate installation instructions. I noticed there was no reference so I assumed that it would auto install without any issue. Which it did seem to do.

1. In the description of the plugin, let everyone know that the install document can be found in the homeseer\docs directory. This document should be where the final instructions go. What is there now is how to use the plugin after installation is working. Great reference for scripting the plugin, however useless if you have nothing working.

So I noticed it installed itself into the interfaces and when I restarted I ran into my first problem. My log reported about 50 instances of the mswinsck.ocx file either missing or needing to be registered. I can register anything using regserv32, however this file was not found on my computer. So I have not yet overcome this issue. So.

2. This may be a common setup issue and may need to be listed in the instructions under common install issues.

So I thought this would be a good time to do a search on the instructions for this potentially useful plugin. An hour later I found a few references to some instructions that apparently didnt get migrated to the new board. So this is when I started looking deeper and the more I dug the more the dirt poured in. Some instructions applied to running a setup.exe for install then others reporting to let the updater do the install. Bottom line there was nothing definitive.

With no luck I decided to just install the plugin and girder and netremote just to look and see how it works and see how it might make some sense.

3. The instructions should provide information on the GUI as to what port is to be used on the hsGirder plugin and what a TCPip password is and how is it setup. The gui is completely greek to the layman of which I am chief.

So simply a word doc with screen shots of setup of the client and the server that is stored in the homeseer\docs directory. Maybe a zip file of uncommon files that may not get installed. Maybe a breif description of terminology like what is a payload. etc.

From what I gather there are not a lot of steps to the setup, it seems most of the work comes from the actual scripting and this seems to be well documented.

I will post my experiences here in this thread to provide the newbie experience with this plugin.

Dave

[Michael G]

It looks like Watermans guide did not get moved over from the old board along with the ton of other stuff. Here is that latest guide that I have that Rick Fox was working on.

George
Update: Here's a good one! This is the message I just got when I tried to upload the doc file.

hsGirder Beta User Guide.zip:
File Too Large. Limit for this filetype is 585.9 KB. Your file is 593.2 KB.

Who the heck set the limit at such a weird number like 585.9KB???!!!@@@@

Let me try to break up the doc file into two files so I can upload them. It's just an MSWord doc file so you should be able to open both of them or merge them yourself.

G

George, or anyone
Ive been busy with work and sick father, so I have not been very active on the board.
Is there a way to recover my help guide. If not, I could try to make a new one if useful.
Also I can not get my page name (Water Man) to ID my post since the new board. Ive checked my profile, but page name still showing as Michael G. What am I missing??
Thanks,
Michael....aka Waterman.

George, found most if not all my old post in my attachments. Will re-post if it is helpfull. Still don't know how to fix my page name though??
Let me know,
Michael.....aka Waterman

[George]

Michael,

Welcome back and I hope your father get's better.

It's possible that your guide might be on the older Infopop board. You may want to look there to see if you can pull it out. I know a lot of people were relying on your guide to get them started.

On the ID issue. This board does not support nicknames on top of the user names. So, if you really want Waterman back there is a thread in the 'this message board' forum that Rick Tinker monitors. If you ask to have your logon ID changed to Waterman he can do it for you.

George

[Michael G]

George,
We were posting at the same time. See above. Thanks for info, I'll start a new help Mon or Tue.
What time is this board on, Greenwich??
aka....Waterman

Found time answer and fixed mine for Eastern.
Thanks for asking about my Father. In late stages of Alzheimer's. Still use you great plugin daily.
Michael

[George]

I'm sure that he was already put on Aricept. My ex bosses father also has Alzheimers and he said that Aricept really helped him.

[Rick Fox]

Michael

Sorry to hear of your fathers illness, hope he gets better. Wondered where you had gone.

If you take a look at what I have put together at the top of this thread, I believe that I have duplicated most of what you had in your thread. Also I am talking with John to see if anything needs to be added since the 1.0 release. Also if there is anything that you see that I have missed or is incorrect let me know as well. Once I have added more info the file I will upload as a PDF to hopefully cut down on the size.

Rick

[d-smes]

That's (not) funny....
I was referencing Michael's fine write-up just last week on the old board. I was going to post a link, but tonight when I go to the old board, I get "The page cannot be found". Hopefully, it is just down for maintenance. If not, that will be a great loss. Because as George has said, there is a lot of great information there. And helpful troubleshooting of common setup problems.

[d-smes]

I guess all the old posts got migrated after all. Michael's guide is at http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=96916

I didn't see this until I set the "Display Options" at the bottom of the screen to "From the Beginning". Duhhhh

[monachus]

All of the documentation appears to be for HS1, including all of the screenshots. I am seeing posts that claim hsGirder works with HS2, but after any event I generate in HS2, I get the following in my log:

Response: Girder is not running, event was not triggered

Girder _is_ running (v4). I've looked in every place that I can think of for settings and such, and the following 2 items lead me to believe that HS2 and hsGirder don't play right:

1. All the docs refer to the "hsGirder" menu tab in HS1, which is now the orange buttons in the HS2 web GUI. There is no hsGirder button.

2. HS2 gives the following when I save config settings for hsGirder via the Setup/Interfaces page:

GetDevice is not reliable for device enumeration. Please use the new GetDeviceEnumerator method.

What am I missing? All I want is to be able to have Girder receive HS2 events and act on them. It shouldn't be this hard.