Meanwhile, a friend gave me a tablet, cheap chinese thing, which I planned to use to display the dashboard in a visible place in the house.
The thing could even display the HTML5 and handle the AJAX calls and all, but it was unstable, sleep mode would spend the battery almost as fast as normal mode, slow to boot, bad touchscreen (resistive), and so on, and so on, so I quit on it, and consequently on the progress on the dashboard, as the experience while using it is, in my opinion, of great importance!
A few months later, my wife offered me an iPad, the new retina display model! so that rekindled my interest in the dashboard. I came back to iWeb, expanded the design a bit, and have spend a couple of evenings implementing the functionality...this is the result:
And for the explanation:
electricity and gas consumption: the pointers move, as the data is updated, and shake slightly when stable, to indicate that the thing is alive. The numbers are updated twice a minute.
House control: this interfaces mainly with the FHZ1000 part of the automation. It reads set, measure and desired temperatures, displays the measured, and makes the box green if the room is set for comfort temperature (even if it has not yet been reached) and blue for low temperature. The boxes turn orange is there is no reply.
The buttons for the awnings are toggle buttons: click to extend them and click to retract them, since the system has no idea of what their status is (they can be operated locally). They briefly blink through orange to give feedback that something happened!
climate limited: is a button to limit the maximum temperature to which any room can be set
holiday mode: should set all rooms to a low temperature and out of the standard program. this is the only button not yet functional (and therefore transparent).
Door events: list of the last 4 events on the RFID door.
System messages: reports errors on the system, like now, the weather station has stopped transmitting.
Agendas: list a few items (enough to fill the respective boxes) taken from google calendar. I have a google calendar for the house, where I put the garbage schedule, and other maintenance activities that need to take place.
Outside temperature: like the name says, displays the data from the weather station. Now it displays nothing, since the station stopped working - see system messages :)
And that is it! data is updated on timers, and the agendas on loading of the page.
There has been talk in the tubes about some mechanisms to update data in real-time. That should be the next development, but that might take another few years :) This is nice enough to show to my friends :)
AH! last but not the least, I found out that one can include some lines in an HTML page to make it a iPad app, so, by adding:
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent" />
I can save the page onto the iPad desktop (is it what it is called?) and run it as any other app, without the safari address bar. Only the top bar with the clock and stuff is still visible, but that is even a plus, as it gives you a clock and iPad info!
I'll try to post a screenshot from the iPad soon!
