Hi guys,
I'm the developer of the CQC automation product (http://www.charmedquark.com). It's a very powerful and extensive software based automation product (commercial, not open source.) Some of you may be aware of it.
There's a lot of interest in providing integration between CQC and XBMC. There are various options. One is CQC controlling XBMC. I don't think that this is much of an issue. It just requires a CQC driver to do, and as long as XBMC provides some sort of callable interface, IP I assume, then that's not a big worry.
But some folks are interested in getting access to CQC from with XBMC. This I'm a lot more iffy about. It would be a lot of work to explore since I know little about XBMC at this point. So I just want to get some 'from the horse's mouth' info about what is possible, so that I know I'm not wasting time.
We provide an XML over sockets interface to CQC, so that's the likely means of doing this. If necessary I could provide an even simpler one, but I'd like to avoid it. But as long as the ability to properly format (and escape) XML and to parse XML reliably exists then our 'XML Gateway' would be a likely means of integration.
Where I'm more iffy is, exactly how would we do this. I'm sure it would be pretty straightforward to do something like provide some sort of way to invoke CQC configuration actions (aka scripts.) It would just require the ability to send out text strings via IP to an instance of our generic trigger driver (where it is trained to invoke a particular action in response to a particular incoming string.)
But the opportunity is there to do lots more, particularly in the area of two way control. CQC and provide access to the status of any of the devices it is controlling. But I'm not sure how that would work within XBMC. Just having a simple screen you can flip to that would display some CQC info would be useful I guess, but not nearly so much as being able to make us of that information on other screens within XBMC, but I'm not sure that's really doable or not?
It would require ongoing polling of CQC for changes in the information of interest (i.e. it wouldn't be useful to just grab the data upon entry to some screen.) It needs to be polled in an ongoing basis and screen elements that are displaying that information updated.
Another option, though it wouldn't be doable in Python I don't think so it would likely require some of you guys to take it on (since I'm a Unix idiot) is that we have a technology called RIVA, which allows our graphical interfaces to be displayed via third party code, in a sort of X-Window'ish sort of way. I.e. our system tells the client what to display at a basic level, but all of the real work is done on the back end in our servers. A RIVA server would typically be maybe two to four thousand lines of code all told, depending on the language, so not a lot of code in return for what it provides.
So that could be a way of having a 'CQC tab' I guess within XBMC that would expose all of the features of our automation interfaces. That of course though would definitely be more of an isolated section within XBMC to interact with CQC, not a way to really fully expose our system to other XBMC plugins and such.
So, anyway, I'm open to suggestions as to how this integration could be done. I think it would be advantageous to the XBMC community as well since it would open up access to a wide world of device control by way of CQC, in addition to all of CQC's other capabilities, and of course control the other way so that XBMC can be integrated into CQC automation systems.
I'm the developer of the CQC automation product (http://www.charmedquark.com). It's a very powerful and extensive software based automation product (commercial, not open source.) Some of you may be aware of it.
There's a lot of interest in providing integration between CQC and XBMC. There are various options. One is CQC controlling XBMC. I don't think that this is much of an issue. It just requires a CQC driver to do, and as long as XBMC provides some sort of callable interface, IP I assume, then that's not a big worry.
But some folks are interested in getting access to CQC from with XBMC. This I'm a lot more iffy about. It would be a lot of work to explore since I know little about XBMC at this point. So I just want to get some 'from the horse's mouth' info about what is possible, so that I know I'm not wasting time.
We provide an XML over sockets interface to CQC, so that's the likely means of doing this. If necessary I could provide an even simpler one, but I'd like to avoid it. But as long as the ability to properly format (and escape) XML and to parse XML reliably exists then our 'XML Gateway' would be a likely means of integration.
Where I'm more iffy is, exactly how would we do this. I'm sure it would be pretty straightforward to do something like provide some sort of way to invoke CQC configuration actions (aka scripts.) It would just require the ability to send out text strings via IP to an instance of our generic trigger driver (where it is trained to invoke a particular action in response to a particular incoming string.)
But the opportunity is there to do lots more, particularly in the area of two way control. CQC and provide access to the status of any of the devices it is controlling. But I'm not sure how that would work within XBMC. Just having a simple screen you can flip to that would display some CQC info would be useful I guess, but not nearly so much as being able to make us of that information on other screens within XBMC, but I'm not sure that's really doable or not?
It would require ongoing polling of CQC for changes in the information of interest (i.e. it wouldn't be useful to just grab the data upon entry to some screen.) It needs to be polled in an ongoing basis and screen elements that are displaying that information updated.
Another option, though it wouldn't be doable in Python I don't think so it would likely require some of you guys to take it on (since I'm a Unix idiot) is that we have a technology called RIVA, which allows our graphical interfaces to be displayed via third party code, in a sort of X-Window'ish sort of way. I.e. our system tells the client what to display at a basic level, but all of the real work is done on the back end in our servers. A RIVA server would typically be maybe two to four thousand lines of code all told, depending on the language, so not a lot of code in return for what it provides.
So that could be a way of having a 'CQC tab' I guess within XBMC that would expose all of the features of our automation interfaces. That of course though would definitely be more of an isolated section within XBMC to interact with CQC, not a way to really fully expose our system to other XBMC plugins and such.
So, anyway, I'm open to suggestions as to how this integration could be done. I think it would be advantageous to the XBMC community as well since it would open up access to a wide world of device control by way of CQC, in addition to all of CQC's other capabilities, and of course control the other way so that XBMC can be integrated into CQC automation systems.
