This version no longer includes the original Vera plugin but only the new Vera UI7 plugin. If you haven’t already upgraded to the new plugin when this version is loaded it will disable the original interface and write a message to the log asking you to convert. To switch to the new plugin edit your existing interface and change the device type popup to “Vera UI7”. The conversion dialog will popup and give you an opportunity to cancel the conversion before making a backup of your database and restarting the interface with the new plugin.
NEW: The Raspberry Pi GPIO plugin now supports both Hardware and Software based serial ports. The hardware serial port handles the built in UART and any USB/Serial adaptors you have connected to the Pi. The Software serial will handle “bit banged” serial to any of the GPIO pins. You can create any number of these on the pi as you like. The serial data is brought out to a local TCP port on the XTension machine to which you can connect any network aware application or any other XTension plugin that can speak to a device over the network. This turns your pi into a multi-output Serial to ethernet/wifi adaptor with many possibilities. Note that if you need RS232 level output you must use either a proper level shifter or a USB/Serial adaptor. The Pi’s built in uart and gpio pins can only be attached to 3.3v and lower voltages or they WILL burn out.
Change: The Ramp Rate parameter to all the lamp control verbs is now treated as a floating point number and not an integer. This will let you properly send fractional second ramp rates to newer plugins that support that as the timing parameter rather than the older ones which used whatever value the low level device expected. As all the older plugins are updated they will ultimately all use the same value for ramp rate in seconds regardless of the underlying device.
Change: The writing of the log file cache no longer needs to block the main thread making the program more responsive during a background database save. This eliminates potentially several seconds of unresponsiveness during a regular database save.
Change: I’ve removed the option in the preferences for “Keep database updated” This just ate SSD drives too quickly without providing that much added value. I also removed the checkbox next to the “save database every” entry. You can no longer turn off regular saving of the database but you can set the interval to anything from 10 minutes or longer.
Added a checkbox to turn off the “High Sierra Fix” background app. This is only visible if you are running High sierra and disappears again once you update to Mojave. Some folks are still having the occasional problem with that causing the app to hang up. If you wish to keep running High Sierra and have that problem you can turn it off in the preferences. Make sure to set your screen to never go to sleep though or XTension, and anything else you’re running on the machine, will periodically hang up for minutes or hours at a time until you or someone wakes up the screen.
Fix: The “Alerts” window shows again. This was broken in a previous release and would just open empty. It will again show you lists of interfaces with errors, units with errors, units with low battery indications and interfaces that are disabled. You can find this window in the Windows menu.
Fix: The RadioRA Lutron plugin works again with the new UTF-8 plugin support.
Fix: X10 address matrix is no longer displayed when you click the “…” button next to the address field for the new W800 plugin. It previously displayed but showed no useful information and logged errors if you clicked on it. I will revisit the matrix display for such things in a future build.
Fix: The “last message date” property is getting set properly for the new W800 plugin. This lets you better check for units that are failing to check in regularly even if they never sent a low battery message. You can use the “insert custom column” menu item in the list windows to add a column to display the time the unit was last heard from even if the last activity has not updated.
New: Added “resync”, “pause” and “Resume” commands to the websocket plugin. See the included demo page for how to use those and what they are good for if you’re interested.
Fix: The new Hue plugin no longer sends constant updates to try to set an error condition in a battery operated remote device that is not responding.
Fix: The new Hue plugin will properly update the local status and error conditions of lamps when you control them from a separate Hue app.
Fix: The new Hue plugin’s “slow polling” option was reversed really being on when it should have been off. It will now load up correctly. If you have manually reversed the logic to make it work properly for you please undo that.
Fix: The new Hue plugin will no longer throw errors when controlling certain lamp types rather than actually controlling them.
Fixed several layout issues with plugin unit controls that did not line up properly on the edit unit dialog.
Change: In the Vera plugin I increased the timeout before it reports a device is offline. This should accommodate the slightly longer restart times that newer devices are seeing. You won’t receive an alert until the device has been offline for a few minutes longer than the normal restart time.
Fix: The JSON server would throw an error if the charset was added to the content-type header causing problems on certain iOS versions for Locative receptions as well as other things. The content type is now properly recognized regardless of additional information that might be included in the header line.
New: Added a contextual menu and a toolbar menu action to the Manage Global Scripts window to clear the error display for that script.
Fix: Fixed an issue when renaming a Global Script. If the new name was the same except changing the case of some letters it would previously think you had entered the same name and change nothing. You can now make capitalization changes to a Global Script name.
Several small improvements to the database save and load times. Also less disk access during the first database save after loading since all scripts are no longer being marked as dirty during the init process. Nothing you’ll probably notice, but I have also found several of the other bottlenecks that I’ll be addressing in future builds.
New: Internally the sharing mechanism for plugins now supports sharing Views as well as all other data types necessary for displaying graphs and video streams on remote receivers. There is nothing available to connect this to, but the development internally is continuing apace and fun stuff will appear before long.