Kinect on the way!

[spud]

I will add some actions and/or scripts to enable/disable voice recognition and presence recognition as you can do it from the config page, in the next version of the plugin.

[cheeryfool]

Spud
The Kinects obviously have to be plugged in to WinPC at present, but is it possible for them to talk to a Linux install of HS3 using the remote instance option, or will remote instances only work in a fully Windows environment?
Cheers. James.

[spud]

Spud
The Kinects obviously have to be plugged in to WinPC at present, but is it possible for them to talk to a Linux install of HS3 using the remote instance option, or will remote instances only work in a fully Windows environment?
Cheers. James.

I have never tested it, but it should work because from a communication point of view it is the same thing than a remote kinect on windows talking to a windows install of HS3

[spud]

Is there a way to accomplish this? I'm getting falls positives with .8 confidence when watching movies or playing games. If so then I could easily have it disabled on XBMC play and re-enabled on pause/stop. Running steam on the HTPC also, Maybe Jon00's plugin can help there too if I can set some sort of triggers.

Thanks in advance!

in version 3.0.0.13 available here, I have added the following actions:
- Enable Voice Recognition
- Disable Voice Recognition
- Enable Visual Recognition
- Disable Visual Recognition

so that you can now disable VR from an event when a movie is playing, etc...

[S-F]

Wow. These thing are pretty cost effective these days huh?

@ kideon,

Thanks for pointing out that these are so cheap now! Just ordered one and am excited to experiment.

[kideon]

Have at it man you'll love it!

So I've been living with the kinect plugin for a couple of weeks now and wanted to share the experience. It was connected to an always on htpc/homeseer server in the den which was hooked up to a receiver and projector. That same stack of gear also had the hue controller and global cache wf2ir. It was to the point where Reginald (his name) would at the command "energize" turn everything on and then shut down with "shutdown" He would also start and stop music and speak the weather. This of course required a lot of backend work to get everything scripted and configured but it worked like a charm and just scratched the surface. Having the system intelligently power on, switch inputs and selectively power off including specific events tied into the dawn/dusk cycle is an amazing integration. With the new plugin upgrades to enable/disable the functions I get a whole new range of control.

Now I just built a new HTPC/Gaming PC and the old box will become exclusively the house server. The new box is much more powerful so I will play around with presence detection since the cpu use won't be as extreme.

Now my only hurdle is figuring out how to energize reginald with the htpc being asleep. I plan on integrating Jon00's remote management plugin to do WOL and other stuff to the HTPC so I could obviously use hstouch, hard buttons etc. I just won't be able to wake it up with the voice though will have control afterwards. I could just set it up to keep the htpc awake during certain hours then sleep others when I would not be down there but that is a 60 watt/hour expense to be able to turn things on at whim with my voice... Anyone know a simple way to calculate my energy costs that may help my decision..

Spud I have a question. Would it be possible to have your plugin take input from a microphone? Would be great to have VR up and running on just your plugin and not have to code for both for remotes that don't have kinects. Also still recommend some tighter integration between your various plugins they could be aware of each other and automagically act together.

Thanks for writing this, even with a few hours of work it really enhanced my entertainment experience. WAF is off the charts too, especially with spoken announcements.

[kenrad]

Have at it man you'll love it!

So I've been living with the kinect plugin for a couple of weeks now and wanted to share the experience. It was connected to an always on htpc/homeseer server in the den which was hooked up to a receiver and projector. That same stack of gear also had the hue controller and global cache wf2ir. It was to the point where Reginald (his name) would at the command "energize" turn everything on and then shut down with "shutdown" He would also start and stop music and speak the weather. This of course required a lot of backend work to get everything scripted and configured but it worked like a charm and just scratched the surface. Having the system intelligently power on, switch inputs and selectively power off including specific events tied into the dawn/dusk cycle is an amazing integration. With the new plugin upgrades to enable/disable the functions I get a whole new range of control.

Now I just built a new HTPC/Gaming PC and the old box will become exclusively the house server. The new box is much more powerful so I will play around with presence detection since the cpu use won't be as extreme.

Now my only hurdle is figuring out how to energize reginald with the htpc being asleep. I plan on integrating Jon00's remote management plugin to do WOL and other stuff to the HTPC so I could obviously use hstouch, hard buttons etc. I just won't be able to wake it up with the voice though will have control afterwards. I could just set it up to keep the htpc awake during certain hours then sleep others when I would not be down there but that is a 60 watt/hour expense to be able to turn things on at whim with my voice... Anyone know a simple way to calculate my energy costs that may help my decision..

Spud I have a question. Would it be possible to have your plugin take input from a microphone? Would be great to have VR up and running on just your plugin and not have to code for both for remotes that don't have kinects. Also still recommend some tighter integration between your various plugins they could be aware of each other and automagically act together.

Thanks for writing this, even with a few hours of work it really enhanced my entertainment experience. WAF is off the charts too, especially with spoken announcements.

A few ideas that I have on this. I an running alot of kinects around my home and using Jon00 remote client control and kinects I only leave teh main server PC running 24/7 and then either run events at set times to turn on the other PC's and start the instances of the kinect plug in or else I do it with voice and door sensors. If I open the garage doors it starts the Pc in the garage and launches the kinect plugin. a simple voice command also closes the remote plugin adn shutsdown the computer. Just a few of my ideas on this

Cheers Ken

[spud]

Have at it man you'll love it!

So I've been living with the kinect plugin for a couple of weeks now and wanted to share the experience. It was connected to an always on htpc/homeseer server in the den which was hooked up to a receiver and projector. That same stack of gear also had the hue controller and global cache wf2ir. It was to the point where Reginald (his name) would at the command "energize" turn everything on and then shut down with "shutdown" He would also start and stop music and speak the weather. This of course required a lot of backend work to get everything scripted and configured but it worked like a charm and just scratched the surface. Having the system intelligently power on, switch inputs and selectively power off including specific events tied into the dawn/dusk cycle is an amazing integration. With the new plugin upgrades to enable/disable the functions I get a whole new range of control.

Now I just built a new HTPC/Gaming PC and the old box will become exclusively the house server. The new box is much more powerful so I will play around with presence detection since the cpu use won't be as extreme.

Now my only hurdle is figuring out how to energize reginald with the htpc being asleep. I plan on integrating Jon00's remote management plugin to do WOL and other stuff to the HTPC so I could obviously use hstouch, hard buttons etc. I just won't be able to wake it up with the voice though will have control afterwards. I could just set it up to keep the htpc awake during certain hours then sleep others when I would not be down there but that is a 60 watt/hour expense to be able to turn things on at whim with my voice... Anyone know a simple way to calculate my energy costs that may help my decision..

Spud I have a question. Would it be possible to have your plugin take input from a microphone? Would be great to have VR up and running on just your plugin and not have to code for both for remotes that don't have kinects. Also still recommend some tighter integration between your various plugins they could be aware of each other and automagically act together.

Thanks for writing this, even with a few hours of work it really enhanced my entertainment experience. WAF is off the charts too, especially with spoken announcements.

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes it should be possible to have my VR engine takes input from a regular microphone instead of a Kinect, I will add this feature but not sure when.

As for tighter integration between my plugins, you mean bypassing the HS events so that one plugin can trigger an action of another plugin without having to define a HS event? so that would be kind of like writing my own home automation software....

[kideon]

[kenrad]

I think you meant speaking but that would be annoying if you are watching a movie on XBMC and an announcement went off and it paused he movie instead of just allowing the announcement to play while the movie is going. I have alot of announcements with HS for things like when a garage door is opened I want ot know if it was opened but not sure I want my movie to automatically pause when it does. another example Is I use the Jon00 network monitor to let me know if one of my HS clients is offline if HS notifies me again I need to fix it but not immediately and wouldnt want the movie to pause

Just my thoughts and examples

Cheers Ken

[kideon]

Pausing and resuming would be an option another would be to display an announcement window with the text instead of speaking it to xbmc if it were playing

[kenrad]

Pausing and resuming would be an option another would be to display an announcement window with the text instead of speaking it to xbmc if it were playing

I do something similar now all of my announcements are sent to speaker clients when XBMC is not playing but when it is it sends the message as a GUI notification except for the important ones those area always send as both as well as pushover notifications to mobile devices

Cheers Ken

[kideon]

I'd like to implement that. How did you do the conditional logic by calling events from each other with specific conditions or scripting?

Question for you fellas on the media serving. Now that I have a dedicated server I want to be able to access a library that stays in sync. I am running Plex for my rokus and xbmc on my htpc. I like the xbmc integration and can live with the lack of pled (for now) Even the lack of synchronicity is ok just as long as the library my HTPC accesses is kept up to date.

So I have a couple of options. I can use the XBMCPlex plugin which will access Plex like a normal client and even integrate with the right skin to appear to be a native library. I could also just run XBMC with UPNP all the time on my server, the htpc would feed off it and the library would stay in sync. I am leaning towards this method since xbmc itself wouldn't have much overhead to keep running. Also with that method I could still call the individual files from the XBMC homeseer plugin, not sure if would work with plex.

Got any thoughts? Also anyone see my note about energy, might be the wrong forum but thought you might know.

[kenrad]

I'd like to implement that. How did you do the conditional logic by calling events from each other with specific conditions or scripting?

Question for you fellas on the media serving. Now that I have a dedicated server I want to be able to access a library that stays in sync. I am running Plex for my rokus and xbmc on my htpc. I like the xbmc integration and can live with the lack of pled (for now) Even the lack of synchronicity is ok just as long as the library my HTPC accesses is kept up to date.

So I have a couple of options. I can use the XBMCPlex plugin which will access Plex like a normal client and even integrate with the right skin to appear to be a native library. I could also just run XBMC with UPNP all the time on my server, the htpc would feed off it and the library would stay in sync. I am leaning towards this method since xbmc itself wouldn't have much overhead to keep running. Also with that method I could still call the individual files from the XBMC homeseer plugin, not sure if would work with plex.

Got any thoughts? Also anyone see my note about energy, might be the wrong forum but thought you might know.

I use three events for the speech the first one is simply the one that is triggered by what ever you want the that event runs two other events with conditions if the condition are true (XBMC device playing/not playing) it will then take the appropariate action.

As for the media server stuff. I use all XBMC so I cant comment on plex I played with it a little once but preferred XBMC so I stopped. in my setup I have all of my media on a NETGear STora NAS and that feeds music and video to all of my instances of XBMC I also am hoping to get my cable TV to play through XBMC but not having much luck there only getting the locals right now cant find a network tuner that will do it.

Cheers Ken

[kideon]

are you doing a centralized mysql database for xbmc and for your speech handling event are you calling that any time you want speech then doing the conditional event calls with xbmc and if so how are you passing the message?