10' UI for Indigo control

Posted on
Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:15 pm
FlyingDiver offline
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Location: Southwest Florida, USA

10' UI for Indigo control

I'm currently designing and prototyping the components for a new home build later this year. Indigo running on a Mac mini will be the HA controller, and probably the surveillance system controller too, unless I use my Synology NAS for that. One thing that had me stumped was a good interface for the AV distribution system. We'll have a few DirecTV boxes that will need to serve a half-dozen TVs, so a distribution system is needed. I really didn't want to rely on handheld remotes for this, I wanted an on-screen UI for the TVs like Control4 or Crestron.

So I was thinking of what software I had seen that had a UI designed for TVs (the proverbial "10 foot" UI), and I thought of XBMC. It's designed for Home Theatre TVs, so it's got the UI and it's very configurable. For a pure playback UI, I prefer Plex, but it's not as flexible as XBMC, so that what I focused on. Then I found out that XBMC will run on a Raspberry PI, and the whole setup including IR receiver is well under $100. Hmm. Time to dig into addons for XBMC.

So here's what I've got working so far:

1. An addon for XBMC called script.indigo that will upload commands/data to Indigo using an IWS plugin to write information to Indigo variables. The IWS plugin also writes the current UNIX timestamp to a variable called xbmc_last.

2. A trigger in Indigo that's set to fire on any change to xbmc_last. The action component of this trigger will send commands to the video switcher matrix based on the parameters sent from XBMC.

3. UI customization for XBMC that adds a home menu button called "Sources", with submenu items for each of the selectable sources (Sat 1, Sat 2, Blu-Ray, etc). The submenu items call the script.indigo with the source selected. The script sends Indigo a "select" command, "source" identifier, and "device" (destination) identifier. That should be enough send the right commands to the switch. Depending on the configuration of sources and inputs, I will probably also need to send an input select command to the TV to have it switch from the rPi input to the matrix switch input.

I don't have any HDMI switches yet, or a TV that will take commands via IP. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on some this summer for more prototyping.

Next on my list to explore adding a pop-up menu (maybe cascading menu lists) to XBMC so I can send more types of commands to Indigo. I can have an arbitrary number of arguments to the Indigo script, I would just need to define more variables or pack the data into a JSON string instead.

I'll update this thread as I get things working.

joe

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Sun Jun 22, 2014 3:06 pm
matt (support) offline
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Re: 10' UI for Indigo control

Cool -- I'd definitely like to see how this progresses, so do please keep us updated.

Image

Posted on
Sun Jun 22, 2014 3:14 pm
FlyingDiver offline
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Location: Southwest Florida, USA

Re: 10' UI for Indigo control

Here's a screen shot of the source list menu:

Image

When I select one of the inputs, here's what I'm logging in Indigo:

Code: Select all
  Action Collection               XBMC Action: Select Device: iMac-1 Source: 4 Dest Input: 1


So all I need is more hardware now. :)

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Sun Jun 22, 2014 7:38 pm
Korey offline
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Re: 10' UI for Indigo control

Looks Great!

--
Korey

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