hamw wrote:
Berkinet,
per your post, can I still assume that I will be able to plug in the USB cable to the mac, find it with serial bridge and write some simple scripts to send commands to the unit?

If all you want to do is to send command to the ad2usb from Serial-Bridge, then the answer is yes. Just plug the ad2usb into the Mac's USB port and write to it. As Sean noted earlier, there is no protocol or formatting, just send exactly the same characters you would send when you press the keypad's buttons [0-9,*,#].

However, if you want to do anything else, including figuring out if a command was accepted, then you will have to also parse the messages from the panel and develop some logic around using those messages. For example, you may send 12343 to Arm-Stay the panel, but if it were faulted, it would not arm. Unless you are watching the return messages, you would not know that, and would think it had been armed. It really depends how automatic and fail-safe you want your system to be.

Until there is a more complete solution, it seems like there are 3 most basic codes of interest, Alarmed Away, Alarmed Stay, and Alarm Off.

Can serial bridge use an applescript to listen for these 3 certain specific codes and then trigger a variable change that could be displayed, for instance, on a control page in indigo? Is that particularly involved?

There are other codes that might also be useful: There is the instant Fire or Police (F1 & F2) and Bypass is an important one, and "*" will cause faults to display after an Alarm Off. Also, if you have multiple partitions, there may be things you'd want to do. It really depends on what you want to be able to control from Indigo.

You would send the codes to the panel (via the ad2usb): Remember, as far as you are concerned, it is really the keypad electronics, and your mac represents the actual keys. If you want to update Indigo variables to indicate the current alarm system state, then you would have to parse the alarm message stream, not the codes.

I do not think that parsing the alarm messages would be that hard, there is a lot of help available on the Indigo forum. But, I am not really very experienced with Serial Bridge and it will probably be replaced in Indigo 5.0 with either a built-in feature, or a plug-in.

No, I just reinstalled the older version. All I run in Mono is the ad2usb GUI so I wasn't that interested in having Mono be up-to-date. I didn't report the problem because there were already other similar reports (and I was lazy). Mostly, it just plan wouldn't load, lots of "stuff not found" errors. It wasn't a subtle issue
Did you have to downgrade Mono to get the GUI working then? It sounds like the GUI wasn't even able to get to the patched SerialPort code?

Now that Sean has a global exception handler, it will be easier to document these errors. There's also Mono2.4OSXSerialPort which is a workaround solution.

I'd be happy to work with you (I have no access to a Mac) to try and identify the problem and any possible solution. However, I understand you may not want to if it's too much of a hassle to change your config.

Sean,

In the thread on AD2USB on OSX you wrote:

********************

It is very easy to interface to AD2USB it sends out very simple to parse lines. The human readable messages from the panel tend to differ slightly from alarm to alarm. It is however easy with this device to capture and write code to identify these messages. Just plug this in and start recording events as you arm/disarm trigger alarms etc

********************

Could you give an example of the serial string that comes from the AD2USB for "alarm set- stay" or whatever? Do you have any familiarity with AppleScript and how one would actually implement a parser, that could then execute a trigger action in Indigo? For some reason I have the impression that it may be tricky, based on Berkinet's posts.

Also, while I agree for sure that the more interpreted strings the better, I'm just looking for simplicity and ease of use at this point.

I have not updated this page since v1 so some of the info has changed. The Basic idea and most of the actual data in section #1 is still accurate.

http://www.nutech.com/forums/30.html

I plan on updating this page soon.

The basic idea is you can determin ARMED home/away etc by just looking at the 0 or 1 in section #1

Section #1 is provided by ad2usb by parsing the data as shown in section #3 or the raw panel data. Section #4 is your "TEXT" data as seen on your alpha keypads. It can vary from panel to panel but most standard messages are the same like a zone fault.

I did start reading up on indigo and Apple Script last night to see what issues exist. Seems like version 5 will solve lots of the extensibility issues with the embedded python scripting.

I was reading about some examples on the site but they are in a format I cant read. I plan on hijacking my kids MacBookPro to look at them in the near future.

Some examples talk about listening to some phone dtmf decoder device that is serial/usb so if they can listen to that stuff then I see no reason why we would have a problem but until i see that code I can only guess as to the complexity of having this work.

Re
Sean M