Help me with a Smart Home Interview – US Participants Needed

[akbooer]

Have you got AltUI going correctly? Don’t expect the openLuup console to be a complete replacement, particularly for fancy UI things.

If AltUI is not working correctly, then something fairly basic is probably wrong with the configuration. One of the first thing to look at is the locale setting on your machine.

[Quixote]

@akbooer
I stopped trying to get AltUI working since using openLuup's UI seemed to work. Plus I can't see myself paying a recurring subscription fee for a UI that ideally I will never have to see or use after getting everything set up correctly. I'm too cheap to pay a year's subscription for something that I may use for 3 hours after the initial programming. Now, if it were a one time version fee...

Loading AltUI gives me a popup box that says simply, "fail". That hurts my feelings. When I installed Lua and the dependencies, everything went smoothly. Installing openLuup seemed to hang near the end of the installation, but I was able to start it and display AltUI in windows Firefox (with the "fail" message). I was able to update VeraBridge, which seems to have installed it. With VeraBridge I hit "GetVeraFiles" and observed the devices listed. I see a device for LIFX Plugin, but playing with the sliders/power icons for those lights does not yield the correct results. Strangely, I can make the coinciding light do unpredictable things though sometimes.
The locale setting that you mentioned would be set in the Linux subsystem? or within AltUI? I never use any other language but English, but it's possible that my system is trying to use French since I reside in Quebec, Canada.
Thanks

[akbooer]

Yes, the Linux locale. French or English would be OK, since it has language files for both, so perhaps this is not the issue.

The JavaScript used by plugins for AltUI will not run in the openLuup console interface.

[Quixote]

My Locale is set to en_US.utf8, so I'm all good in that regard.

@akbooer said in New to the forum:

The JavaScript used by plugins for AltUI will not run in the openLuup console interface.

Ok, and what's that in English?

[akbooer]

The openLuup console is not an all-singing and all-dancing UI, doesn’t support fancy browser-based extensions, and isn’t meant as an everyday replacement for AltUI, which remains the primary user-interface for openLuup. Indeed, it’s currently necessary for defining new scenes and variable-watch triggers.

If it’s not running, there’s probably something wrong with your system configuration, although that may have something to do with not having a licence. On the scale of HA installations, it’s not a big cost.

[Quixote]

@akbooer fair enough, but, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I've barely left the starting gate here -- no new scenes, "variable-watch triggers": I have no idea but probably since you brought them up.
Not sure why I would need a license immediately, but in any case, to me it's like paying a yearly subscription for an Echo. When I bought it, it did what it did. Any other developments are the choice of the developer to invest the time into that in order to entice more clients and keep existing ones from leaving for something more appealing. Again, I'm not against a one time fee, but a reoccurring fee doesn't work for me. I also understand that it's in your best interest to have a developer that is well-versed in your project and fully capable of complimenting it on so many levels, however, a dependency on a commercial entity pretty much means that you are no longer "open".
Am I way out of line here?
Oh, and just by the way, if you need icons or anything, I'm willing to help you with that. I have a background in graphic design.

[akbooer]

It’s a fact of history that openLuup would not have existed without AltUI. There’s no way I have the skills to make a modern web interface with asynchronous updates, etc. As my frustrations with Vera grew, AltUI was a huge innovation, which kept me with Vera. TBH, I can’t really imagine using Vera without it, now. After further frustration with the performance and behaviour of the Vera Luup engine, I realised that I did have the skills to develop openLuup.

It’s entirely open, and so BTW is AltUI. Everything is available on GitHub. I don’t consider @amg0 to be a commercial entity, but I take your point, and eschew subscription arrangements for most things. But needs must.

You can certainly continue up to a point with the openLuup interface, but I’m just pointing out that it has its limitations, and the LIFX interface is one such. I’m sure we can get around this, since you imply that you want to control this through one app or other. How is everything else working?

[PerH]

You don't have to pay for 95% of the functions of AltUI as long as you can live with an "unregistered" banner at the bottom. I did that for years, not sure if i actually had to register for how i use it.
On the other side, i'm now so happy with it, that I thought a donation was in order.
try this: [IP]:3480/data_request?id=lr_ALTUI_Handler&command=home&lang=en
That forces use of english.

[Quixote]

@akbooer Unfortunately, not great. I've been trying to set it up so that it will run on boot, but since I followed therealdb's advice and installed WSL on my Windows 10 installation, I've discovered that it doesn't use systemd and it appears I'm on my own in figuring this out now. At this point I'm feeling quite stupid and can't even figure out how to start openLuup again, but I must just be having a bad day.
The other obstacle is that I really don't have that many Zwave devices and my alarm system isn't even set up at this point, so even if I were able to get some traction, every Zwave trigger I have (motion sensor, Wallmote quad) leads to a LIFX light action. I was not able to get those to work, so at this point my tests will generally be meaningless.
@PerH thank you for the tip. I'll look at that once I can get it started again without following the install method all over again that's the only way I've seen in the manual, (aside from scripts for other system types).

[akbooer]

There are three alternatives for starting at boot time documented in the User Guide. I don’t know if either of the alternatives are suitable for your use case. To run openLuup, you just need to run the openLuup_reload.bat file, which wraps Lua in a loop which allows Luup reloads to work.

[Quixote]

I thought batch files were exclusive to a DOS/Windows environment.
I had attempted to set up loading at boot using the the Systemctl approach listed in the appendix, but WSL rejects Systemctl/Stystemd. Everything I've read online states that it's not needed, however fails to mention what to do instead.

[akbooer]

Sorry, you’re right, of course. I was beguiled by the fact that you were, in fact, using a Windows machine. It’s the.sh file.

For me, loading at boot time probably would have lower priority than getting the rest of it running to your satisfaction. How often does the host PC get rebooted anyway?

[Quixote]

Thank you so much for your assistance. I'm sure it can be an eye-rolling experience to help out newbies like me.
You are accurate that loading at boot is not a priority since I often run this machine for weeks art a time before rebooting. I was just trying to start from zero while considering certain factors such as security since I used to rely on my system to text me on my phone (using an email plugin) if something needed my attention.
Definitely not a top priority, so thanks for snapping me back to reality. lol I tend to get side-tracked.
So I tried:
sudo ./run_openLuup.sh
and a get:

Starting openLuup server
To see tail of logfile: tail -f ./out.log

Navigating to any variation of http://172.25.26.14:3480 fails.
http://172.25.26.14:3480/data_request?id=exit does nothing, either.

[akbooer]

Sorry to sound daft, but I have absolutely no idea where you got that file from. What does it contain?

The shell file you need is simply called openLuup_reload and should contain:

#!/bin/sh
#
# reload loop for openLuup
# @akbooer, Aug 2015
# you may need to change ‘lua’ to ‘lua5.1’ depending on your install

lua5.1 openLuup/init.lua $1

while [ $? -eq 42 ]
do
   lua5.1 openLuup/init.lua
done

My bad for calling it a .sh file.

[therealdb]

WSL.exe could be called via command line. So, call wsl via a schedule task on windows calling the openluup_reload script.

[Quixote]

Thanks for bearing with me here.

@akbooer said in New to the forum:

Sorry to sound daft, but I have absolutely no idea where you got that file from. What does it contain?

The file "run_openLuup.sh" was the only file I saw with the extension ".sh" in the directory /etc/cmh-ludl. I found the correct file you mentioned, and tried:
sudo ./openLuup_reload
and I get this:

lua5.1: openLuup/init.lua:291: openLuup - is another copy already running? Unable to start HTTP server on port 3480
stack traceback:
[C]: in function 'error'
openLuup/init.lua:291: in main chunk
[C]: ?

@therealdb Thanks. I'll revisit that once I can get things going again.

[akbooer]

Well, then, you do already have openLuup running, and should be able to access it on port 3480.

[akbooer]

...or, something else is using the port.

[Quixote]

I see nothing running on that port. Also, it still doesn't work even after using "http://172.25.26.14:3480/data_request?id=exit" and attempting to initialize the program again afterwards.
I'm starting to think this may be firewall related, though I'm unsure as to how that would just manifest itself out of nowhere when I had it running fine last week.

Update 1: After rebooting, it just gives me this message:
rm: cannot remove '/www/altui/altui*': No such file or directory
and then hangs.

Update 2: Ok, so I tried running the install again and it seemed to work, but opening the IP address did not. I went and browsed the web for a good hour and then tried again for the hell of it and, lo and behold -- it worked. It no longer has VeraBridge installed or any devices that I had imported last week. AltUI still refuses to load.
Interesting.

[Quixote]

This post is deleted!