rhouse | Home Automation using Ruby

I realize this is not for the faint of heart. Hopefully folks will share their experiences and we can join efforts to improve the docs. Still pretty rough through here, but believe me it’s worth it and you’ll be blown by the kind of stuff you can do in your house with this gem and ruby…​. LinuxMCE comes with different installation modes: Core/Media Center/Hybrid. These instructions specifies the installation on an hybrid box. At this point you should have an clean install of LinuxMCE and a new event interceptor created.
Install LinuxMCE - http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LinuxMCE-0810_alpha2
Make sure you have all the latest updates
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
In order to intercept device events, you will need to register a virtual device with the LinuxMCE core. This device will be the connecting point with the Rhouse gem to intercept the events and make them available to ruby.
Setting up the event interceptor device
From a web browser login and enter the linuxMCE admin console http://my_mce_box/lmce-admin/index.php
From the green menu bar choose Advanced → Configuration → Devices
On the tree on the left - select CORE
Click on Create Child Device
Set Description to 'Event Interceptor'
Click 'Pick device template'
Select Device Category 'Logic Handler' (id=142)
Select Device Template as 'Generic #1' (id=1725)
Click on 'Pick Device Template' button
You should now have a new device created note the device id 'Device Info #xxx' xxx is the ID
Click the 'View' button next to device template
In Command Line enter rh_interceptor Will revisit this later but this is going to be the rh_interceptor exec installed by Rhouse
Install Beanstalkd (http://xph.us/software/beanstalkd/)
On my installation I have configured beanstalkd to be automatically launched upon OS start. The daemon is setup using port 7777. I have provided my lame init.d script in scripts/beanstalk in the gem.
You will need to configure your ruby env on that box. It does come with ruby (1.8.7 ) installed but on my install I have updated rubygems to 1.3.1. sudo gem install derailed-rhouse. From the steps above we now need to tell linuxMCE where to find the newly installed rh_interceptor ruby script. * ssh into you linuxMCE box * cd /usr/pluto/bin * Create a link as root - ln -s /usr/bin/rh_interceptor This will tell linuxMCE to launch the interceptor with the correct device configured in setup with the correct id xxx. * Rhouse expects the environment variable 'RH_ENV' to be set. Edit your .bashrc script and add the following line: * export RH_ENV=production This will setup the Rhouse environment to production in order to connect to the right database and correct configuration on your install box. * Restart linuxMCE * Either from a shell or from the pluto admin console * Wizard → Restart → Reboot. Upon successfull restart you should 'hopefully' see the rh_interceptor as a running process. If not take a look at the pluto log file in /var/log/pluto/pluto.log and see if there was any errors launching the rh_interceptor script.
sudo gem install derailed-rhouse
> ps -elf | grep rh
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/pluto/bin/rh_interceptor -d 35 -r localhost -l /var/log/pluto/35_rh_interceptor.log