Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Home Automation Project #3 Light Switch Cont. - WebUI-Source with WebSockets!

For the best and quickest response times with my webgui I decided to go with websockets. This was my first websocket experiment and it took many, many tutorials and websocket engines for me to finally come to this conclusion. I went with autobahn websockets because of its ease of use and ability to do reactor.callLater() which is the equivelent of a setTimout in javascript from what I understand. With that I used it to constantly check the outputs of my PiFace and send the socket message to the client webapp based off of its changes. So if anyone else in your house turns the lights on or off physically, you can instantly see it change on your phone. Now the only problem is older devices (like my wife's phone) are not all html5 websocket compatible. You may have to create a python cgi script to use as a fallback.

If you are kinda lost and need to recap on the lightswitch series here are the links and summaries:
Setting up the Piface communication listener and the button listener scripts HERE
Pics and description of the WebUI HERE

Setup:
Need to install Twisted, AutoBahnPython, and for the static pages I use lighttpd.

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo easy_install autobahn
sudo apt-get install twisted lighttpd


Websocket Server Code:

needs to run on boot after out PifaceListener script (source found here) has started.

Webpage Code:

I copied to my /var/www/ directory:

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