Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Rover Bug Reports

If you have a bug report to make about Rover, please post it as a comment on this post.

16 comments:

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

Mike reported a problem where Rover would bog his system down for a long time, but I have been unable to replicate it. Anyone seen anything similar?

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

A very frequent problem is people using Insteon (or a few other kinds of devices) that use \ or / as a device code.

The problem here is that different browsers handle URLs with those characters in them in different ways. Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) is notorious for handling them improperly, causing Rover to be unable to parse the unitcode and thus unable to perform device actions. There's no way I know of for Rover to work around this browser limitation.

Though Insteon always forces its devices to the \ housecode, some people have tricked it into moving onto another housecode by editing the configuration files manually. Other people have had good results by switching to a more standards-compliant browser; Opera (and Opera Mini) have been particularly good in this regard.

I'm sorry to say I know of no way to have Rover work around this.

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

If you're connecting from a device which can't prompt for login information, you have two choices:

1. Add the username and password to the bookmark, like so: http://username:password@web.address:port/rover.asp. Not all pocket browsers will support this though!

2. Configure HomeSeer to automatically validate whatever IP address you're coming in from, if it's a predictable one, or one you don't share.

Unknown said...

When I turn the porch light (on A2 (X10) screw-in Lamp Module) on and off using HomeSeer it works without problems. I have scheduled HS to turn it on 20 minutes before sunset and this works every evening.

However, when I try to turn the porch light (using adress A2) on using Rover that specific module does not respond at all! :(

Turning A2 on and off using events manually in Rover works without problems, and I can turn the A2-device off. Just not on.

This works (quote from log file):
13.09.2007 19:26:08 Rover Device action: Turned on the Stue Lys v/ vindu at A3 from Magnus at 84.xxx.xxx.xxx

... and this works:
13.09.2007 19:18:51 Info Device: 1. etg Ute Utelys (A2) ON


This does not:
13.09.2007 19:23:05 Rover Device action: Turned on the Ute Utelys at A2 from Magnus at 84.xxx.xxx.xxx


What am I doing wrong?
Rover is a wonderful add-in to HomeSeer and I desperatly want this to work...

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

Is it possible you have the device set up with the wrong DeviceType? Rover doesn't do anything special to turn devices on and off other than send HomeSeer a command that asks it to do so, and I can't think of a situation where that shouldn't work (or if there was, I'd think it'd be a HomeSeer bug).

Anonymous said...

Thank you! It turned out that that particular Lamp Module was not able to dim the lights. So I changed it from Lamp Module to Appliance Module in HomeSeer and voilá: It works!

Thank you agan! I love this "plugin"! :)

Maui said...

Question:I'm new to Rover "which is great". The only problem I am having that I can not resolve is I am receieving the following error with ALL my gif files Web Server Error 404, cannot serve file: C:\Program Files\HomeSeer 2\html/rover/rover/icons/rover.gif. All my Icons are in the sub dir of Rover and I do have Allow "../" File Access: set to yes and the Bind Server to IP Address:
(set to 'No Binding')

Let me kown if you have any suggestion on how to resolve this issue.

Thanks
Maui

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

Looks like you have an extra "Rover" in the pathname there. Did you maybe move rover.asp from the html root into the rover directory? It should be in the html directory.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

I love your program for use on my palm treo. I am having a problem, however. I don't think this is a bug as much as my incompetence, but I am having trouble getting a control screen for my thermostats like you show in the help file. I have two tstats, one is a z-wave Trane and the other is a proliphix. Both are working fine in HS. However, for neither am I getting that control screen you show in the help file with the different setpoints, etc. Any ideas on how I can get this working? Thx

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

I'm not familiar with all the thermostats out there, but quite a few other people have reported issues with thermostats that do not work with the HomeSeer thermostat standard; instead, each one implements its controls using its own unique plugin.

Rover can't support the entire range of possible plugins; by showing device strings and custom buttons it'll give at least some functionality with some of them, but some plugins seem bent on going out of their way to avoid fitting with any of HomeSeer's standards, and fail to provide even that.

The built-in thermostat functionality in Rover only works with thermostats that use the built-in thermostat functionality in HomeSeer.

Unknown said...

I understand about not being able to support a lot of tstats. I would have thought the z-wave tstat interface written by homeseer corresponds to their standards. I am using the HS z-wave tstat plug-in for my Trane tstat. I am also using the free proliphic tstat plug in which is also provided by homeseer free with HS2. Don't you think they would correspond to the standards they set for tstats? Thx

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

I've given up any hope of understanding what HomeSeer Inc. thinks it's doing anymore. But no, the Z-Wave thermostat they sell isn't compatible with the native HomeSeer thermostat standard. If someone wants to buy me one, I'll be happy to make Rover work with it... but without one to test on it's pretty nearly impossible.

Anonymous said...

Hi, I've had a couple of reports of problems using Rover with devices created by my ISY plugin. The problem appears to be that Rover is not properly URLEncoding the device code characters.

For example, "http://192.168.1.100/rover.asp?action=dev#1off" doesn't work, but changing it to "http://192.168.1.100/rover.asp?action=dev%231off" does. I see lines in the code where it's writing URL's with no encoding of special characters (like line 844). I believe that in all cases, the URL's should be written with any special character's URLEncoded.

The plug-in is following the HomeSeer standard by requesting the next available housecode so it's not something the plug-in has a whole lot of control over.

You can see more discussion about the problem on the HomeSeer forums here: http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=140337

Thanks,
Bob

Anonymous said...

Hi.

I am a Dane. In Danish room is værelse (vaerelse).

When my room names include the Danish character æøå, Rover tells me "No visible devices are in this location."

If I remove the Danish special characters, my devices are shown.

But that ends up with stupid room names. :-)

A Rover url with æ looks like this /rover.asp?show=locSovev%E6relse

Can I somehow use the Danish characters?

Regards

Morten (mhn)

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

The % symbol and the following string is Rover attempting to work around characters that are valid in room names or device codes, but not valid in URLs. It works around most of those Insteon problems, but looks like you're using Unicode characters that are beyond the range of what the Visual Basic ASC function can count up. I don't know if there's a way around this, but if there is, I don't know what it is.