Somewhat overdue, a few updates on what has been happening in the OpenRemote code repository lately.
Summarizing shortly, we've completed and released the source code for OpenRemote 1.0 Milestone 1 (M1). This is the first milestone checkpoint towards the final OpenRemote 1.0 release and it includes all the necessary code to deploy an OpenRemote infrared control end-to-end – sending commands from your iPhone or iPod Touch through the OpenRemote Box (ORB) to the infrared controlled end-device such as your TV, stereo or set-top box.
There's a couple of videos we've posted to demonstrate this in action: Infrared Demo Video and Jean-Luc's It works! blog.
What Is a Milestone?
Milestones are developer releases intended as stable checkpoints for community developers to try and test features in our releases, and provide their own tweaks, fixes and extensions. Milestones are not intended as full product releases. In order to use OpenRemote milestones, you should be very comfortable with all the required development tools:
- Java Development Tools including Apache Ant for building the code from source and deploying software on Apache Tomcat
- Linux development tools including installing Linux distributions, compiling and installing LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) and deploying Tomcat instances
That being said, we do intend to provide more complete documentation on how to use the above tools and install OpenRemote milestones for development and testing. Stay tuned for that.
Where's the Source?
For developers comfortable with a pure source release and very little supporting documentation (we are happy to give you a hand and answer questions on the forums and chat), you can checkout the source code from the subversion repository:
The source release infrastructure is still pretty raw. You have been warned.
What you will get from the checkout is:
- Beehive 1.0 Beta 3
- UI Composer 1.0 Beta 2
- Controller 1.0 Beta 2
- iPhone Console 1.0 Beta 1
Beehive and UI Composer
The versions of Beehive and UI Composer are already deployed and available for you to use at http://composer.openremote.org/demo.
You can browse for infared remote model and compose an user interface to deploy on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The "Download" button will give you the required configuration files for the controller.
Controller
The controller implementation is a Tomcat deployable WAR (Java Web Archive) which you can deploy more or less wherever you can get Tomcat and LIRC to run. It works on our ALIX reference implementation, B202 with Ubuntu or your regular Linux PC. Please check the information about the infrared hardware we've tested with and instructions on how to get LIRC + CommandIR working.
iPhone Console
The iPhone Console is the user interface renderer for iPhone and iPod Touch. It will render the user interface based on the configuration files generated by the UI Composer. In order to get the iPhone console running you will need a Mac OS X and Xcode IDE environment. We are still going through the paperwork (faxing documents back and forth) with Apple but expect an OpenRemote App Store to appear very soon where you can directly download the iPhone distributables.
What's Next?
We are well on our way towards Milestone 2 (M2) and for those loving the life on the bleeding edge, you can already download the source code from the trunk of the OpenRemote subversion repository. The current M2 includes improvements to the iPhone user interface with ability to create multiple pages of buttons (accessible with the iPhone swipe gesture), buttons of different sizes and customizing the look & feel with uploadable icon images. We will be branching and tagging M2 codebase in the next few weeks to make those features and codebase more consumable to developers as well.
On the community contribution side, we have been extremely delighted to see Marcus Redeker already pick up the raw codebase and modifying it to suit his home installation with IRTrans (IP to infrared), JetPort (IP to RS-232), EZcontrol (IP to proprietary RF) and MythTV (via telnet) integration completed. Marcus is already using OpenRemote to control his A/V set up at home, and we are working on getting these contributions shared with the rest of the community.
So expect more release news, more code-drops and more OpenRemote to arrive in the coming weeks,
– Juha
2009/05/02
