This week and this weekend I didn't have much time to work on the editor, so this is a minor update. The new features are not visually impressive but are quite important: We needed an undo/redo framework before we write hundreds of commands and actions. Introducing undo/redo later on would have been a PITA. The other important changes are enhancements to the grid engine, the grid is now resizable and there are presets you can pick from:

Well, just watch the video:

We've been talking about how easy it should be for OpenRemote users to create interfaces, to create remote control consoles and panels. So after the first release of Beehive a few weeks ago, I started working on the visual editor that will be part of the OpenRemote Manager applications. Luckily I had some time during my vacation to look into GWT and write some basic framework code. So it then took only a week (with no knowledge of GWT) to develop a proof of concept - or alpha version if you like - of the editor.

At the moment, the editor loads the XML descriptor outlined here.

The code is not really ready for a CVS commit so I made a video that shows the current status:

Just finished the first iteration of Beehive, so here is a short list of what is there and what is to come:

LIRC codes

The LIRC codes are a seed that was planted to support our first use case: Controlling A/V systems with Infrared. You can browse about 100.000 codes for about 2.500 remote controls here. This database is a 1:1 representation of the LIRC configuration files. Think text configuration files that have been imported into a clean SQL database, so we can do aggregation, searching, etc. on the data in the future.

We also have a web form for uploading new LIRC configuration files, and you can also delete configuration files.

Beehive Webservice

Users (and other projects) can access the Beehive database online through an HTTP webservice. Here is an example for the LIRC data:

GET http://openremote.org/seam/resource/restv1/beehive/lirc

This gives you a list of all vendors for which we have LIRC datafiles, in XML/XHTML. You can even open this in a browser, however, this REST-oriented API is supposed to be used by software clients.

GET http://openremote.org/seam/resource/restv1/beehive/lirc/sony

This is an URI of the representation of a particular vendor, as a list of LIRC configuration files - again as XML/XHTML.

GET http://openremote.org/seam/resource/restv1/beehive/lirc/sony/RM-J701

Finally, this is a plain-text representation of a LIRC configuration file. We don't have an XML representation yet, it's easy to add if we should need it.

The webservice also supports uploading of new LIRC configuration files:

POST http://openremote.org/seam/resource/restv1/beehive/lirc/SOME_VENDOR/MY_NEW_REMOTE

And, deletion:

DELETE http://openremote.org/seam/resource/restv1/beehive/lirc/sony/RM-J701

Updating is not yet supported but easy to add later.

Permissions and history

All of the operations, be it reading, uploading, or deleting of LIRC files require certain permissions. Currently everyone can read all the data and users with a Contributor role on the openremote.org website can also upload or delete records. This is configurable, of course. (Minor issue: The webservice doesn't have authentication enabled, so users can't modify records at the moment because they can't supply their credentials with a request. Will be fixed soon.)

Secondly, we have a simply history event log so we can track who uploaded and who deleted records in Beehive. Naturally the only events you will currently see are the LIRC modifications. At this point I'm not sure we need more than simple event log. We might in the future want to keep a full audit trail of any modification (think temporal data).

What about the Beehive vision?

The goal of Beehive was and still is to be a receptacle for all kinds of codes useful for home automation. The LIRC seed is just the first step. I'm working on a unified and higher-level data model that can encompass Infrared codes, RS codes, what-have-you. This will be the real Beehive database. We are not there yet.

Last week I was browsing for Infrared remote control stuff on remotecentral.com. And well, as a newbie who doesn't have any idea at all how this scene works, I thought I should watch the CEDIA 2007 report from remotecentral. As you'd expect this report is all about universal remote controls.

I actually learned something while watching that. Firstly, that there is a mature industry out there with maybe a dozen players who all are stuck with the share our source code? never! mentality. And no innovation at all. It's all about growing your slice of the cake instead of making the cake bigger.

They all smile into the camera and show their latest creation, all some contraption with 100 buttons or a software UI nightmare. Let me tell you, dear reader, why there is no innovation going on there. By the way, I don't claim to have any insight into this industry and that's probably why I can see it:

These universal remote controls are like electronic typewriters!

Remember these things? A hundred-fiftysomething years ago, some guy invented mechanical typewriters. That was a real leap in technology, just like the cabled remote control changed the way you used a TV a few decades ago.

Fast forward to the 1990s: Typewriters were perfect. I mean, you couldn't have made them any better, you had all the features that you could possibly have in such a device. It took this industry a long time to get that perfection and I bet that in the end they all went to trade shows proudly demonstrating their newest correction fluid and how many more function keys they managed to put on the keyboard. So, why is nobody using electronic typewriters anymore, after all it's a convenient and perfect technology?

The personal computer came along and merely as a side effect (my guess is because of the similar input methods) it replaced all typewriters. This wasn't even a leap, writing documents was suddenly a completely different game altogether.

I tried only one universal remote control vendor and it felt like working with a typewriter. This is stone age technology. And the hottest thing we hear about in news today is a shitty software that shows some buttons on an iPhone which mimic one of these stone age remote controls. Except that I can't use it in the dark anymore because there are no buttons to touch.

This is just boring. Just looking at the capabilities of a piece of hardware like an iPhone or iPod touch, I have a dozen ideas how it can completely turn the universal remote control industry on its head. Everyone I talk to says the same; we are currently experiencing a paradigm shift in how people use mobile devices.

I believe that the OpenRemote effort could be a catalyst of that shift, or at least play an important role.

The Harmony One is just a better hardware than the Harmony 895, so no difference there. It has less buttons, mostly because the little LCD has a touch sensitive area around the screen (where the 895 had like 10 buttons). The software for all Logitech Harmony RCs seems to be the same too.

The Harmony 1000 is what I tried next. It is quite expensive, about 400 EURs. You get the same software but a real touchscreen. Quick summary: It's not worth it.

After only half a day, I already hate the Logitech software. There is no single thing that I could name, it's all bad. The user interface is amateurish and navigating it is very very awkward. There are also some things you just can't do.

For example, I thought it would be a good idea to create an activity (a macro) called I'm going to bed, turn everything off. That doesn't seem to be possible. Any device that you select to be part of an activity first TURNS ITSELF ON when the activity is selected. Well, you can configure everything so that devices that are NOT used for a particular activity are turned off. So I thought I'm smart and created an activity without ANY devices, hoping that if I would switch to that activity, it would turn everything off. Nope, that's just a broken setup because there are no devices selected and you can't transfer this activity to the remote.

OK, so that makes the whole thing unusable because I need to keep the old remotes around just to turn everything off. Wait! You can always stop using the activities and just access the plain IR commands of any devices directly. You pick a device on the remote from a list, then you get pages and pages (12 for my AV receiver) of alphabetically sorted buttons with IR command names. So to turn everything off, I'd have to go into each list and find the PwrOff or PwrToggle command.

Well, still doable if you are really determined. Except that the PwerToggle for my TV doesn't seem to work. The IR command is probably wrong. So I tried to change that in the setup software on my computer. Surprise, all you get when you click that option option is Call help desk. The last would be to try the IR Learn mode but somehow I don't feel like this is worth it.

My conclusion is that this Logitech universal remote stuff is at best average. The software is horrible and besides the IR command database there is no value there. All I want is a simple button to IR-command-macro mapping, this doesn't exist. The flagship product, the Harmony 1000, costs more than two iPod touch and it still feels like last-century technology.