Spurious sensor data can wreak havoc in an otherwise finely-tuned home automation system. I use temperature data from an Aeotech Multisensor 6 to monitor the environment in our greenhouse. Living in Canada, I cannot rely solely on passive systems to maintain the temperature, particularly at night. So, using the temperature and humidity measurements transmitted back to the controller over Z-wave, I control devices inside the greenhouse that heat and humidify the environment.
Indigo currently shipping version 7 is a leading Mac home automation software package. One of it’s mostly widely-used features is its ability to execute user-provided Python scripts of AppleScripts. In my previous introduction to scripting Indigo with Python I showed how to use the Indigo plugin host to execute Python scripts. In this post, I’ll describe how I use a third-party charting package rrdtool to graph data from Indigo by taking advantage of Indigo’s ability to execute arbitrary Python scripts.
Indigo 6 is a popular home automation controller software package on the Mac. Extensibility is one of its main features and it allows users to add a range of features to suit their needs.
Using Python scripting, users can create plugins that provide extended functionality. These plugins can provide a custom configuration UI to the user. Since the documentation around a particular feature - dynamic lists was lacking, I’ve written up my approach here.