Some questions

Hveem · August 24, 2018, 9:13am

Hi, for curiosity’s sake I have some questions: Do Openhab support “follow me”, so the media can be automatically or manually routed to the room you are in? Does it support moving or copying media from a STB ( cable/satellite/terrestrial ) to a centralized storage server ( say a used HP ProLiant DL380 Generation 8 with 5 2Tb sata disks in RAID 10 configuration) automatically?

Does it support a email server ( a example, gets email from a/or external providers, routes them to internal addresses, also routes answers back to the correct external providers) If the internet is down, does it support commands from a SMS gateway ? ( should be limited to accepted SMS commands from white listed or known phone numbers, for obvious security reasons, with a included password)?

MDAR · August 24, 2018, 10:03am

Wow

I’d can’t wait to read what other people suggest for this

I can only offer thoughts on…

STB ( cable/satellite/terrestrial ) to a centralized storage server

I use TVHeadend and a Hauppauge Dual DVB-T2 dongle for watching / recording broadcast media.

TVHeadend

Which gives me the option to use an add-on in Kodi or any media player to watch the streams or recorded .ts files (a power machine running TVHeadend could transcode on the fly if you want smaller MKV or MP4 streams)

As for the GSM part of your question…

I guess you’d need a GSM-Gateway of some kind to give you what you need.

Good luck, it sounds like you’ve got something quite special in mind.

diyha · August 24, 2018, 10:42am

SIM800L ($10) can be used with this Python library, with minor changes.

There is demo how to receive sms and take action. You can then fire item commands on OH using its REST api. Or produce MQTT messages.

Hveem · August 24, 2018, 10:49am

The only thing I know about is Rsync. It is famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination. It seems like it can be set up with a cronjob, but I have no idea if it can be set up with the UI . If not, maybe a function for this should be made.

dan12345 · August 24, 2018, 3:01pm

I use gammu for this, running a cheap USB modem plugged into my linux PC: see tutorial here: Building an SMS gateway for openHAB (on Linux)

diyha · August 24, 2018, 3:05pm

Can the solution work with any GSM SIM in any country?

dan12345 · August 24, 2018, 3:16pm

don’t see why not! Of course the SIM would have to be unlocked for whatever network it’s on.

diyha · August 24, 2018, 3:19pm

Does it also support making calls? At least missed calls in case of emergencies like fire/theft.
FTR I had built a python script to render a .wav audio file over phone call via SIM900 and python GsmModem lib.

dan12345 · August 24, 2018, 3:20pm

haven’t tried - receiving and sending SMS is all I use it for.

diyha · August 24, 2018, 3:29pm

For curious readers here is my script to use SIMCOM family of modems to send SMS or make voice calls (with pre-generated .wav) file.

github.com

diyhomeauto/smarthome/blob/master/dial-sms2.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

"""\
dial-or-sms: dial a list of numbers and playback a .wav file or send SMS

Pythoon script that makes a voice call and plays audio file over GSM modem.
Analog audio is converted to MIC level signals using two resitors (10Kohm and 100 ohm). SIM900 doesn't support AUX line levels.
It uses the dial() methods callback mechanism to be informed when the call is answered and ended.

"""
from __future__ import print_function
from gsmmodem.modem import GsmModem, SentSms
from gsmmodem.exceptions import TimeoutException, PinRequiredError, IncorrectPinError, InterruptedException, CommandError
import sys, time, logging
import logging.config
from pydub import AudioSegment
from pydub.utils import get_player_name, make_chunks
import pyaudio
from serial.serialutil import SerialException, portNotOpenError, writeTimeoutError

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I had to make some minor changes in GsmModem Python library to make SIMCOM modems work. Let me figure out those. It was 4 years back, I think.

rlkoshak · August 24, 2018, 4:13pm

Manually isn’t too hard. You just need a button or selection or the like to indicate what room you are in.

Automatically, you can probably make something work with FIND or reelyActive to detect what room you are in and trigger rules to change the media stream to the appropriate room, assuming that your media device (Sonos, Chomecast, etc) supports migrating a media stream in the middle to a new device.

Ultimately, this won’t really be something that OH itself does, it needs to be supported by the media devices. OH will just interact with the APIs for those devices.

If the STB has a published or reverse engineered API and someone has written code to do this. I would expect this to be unlikely but anything is possible.

No. OH can send email but cannot receive email and it is not an email server.

Not that I’m aware of. But assuming there is an API to this SMS gateway it should be too hard to set something up with scripts and MQTT or OH’s REST API.

If you are limited to just UIs then I’m afraid that these goals will be beyond your ability to accomplish. You will have to get your hands dirty with scripting, coding, and the command line.

OH is not a general purpose system. OH is not a fancy GUI to manage the underlying operating system. It is primarily designed to do home automation. Some people have done a whole lot to integrate media playback and control and CCTV type capabilities with OH but it takes a lot of work and is pretty awkward. Rsync and cron are operating system things. They are, IMHO, outside the domain of what OH should be doing. Far better to use the features built into the OS for something like this.

diyha · August 24, 2018, 4:43pm

I want to integrate this script with text to speech services of OH. So that importent announcements (fire!) can be played back over voice calls to a list of people.