Posts for the month of September 2012

Receiving remote control signals from TellStick Net - Current status

TellStick Net and Telldus Live! are capable of much more than that is currently implemented. The most obvious missing function is the receiving of signals from remote controls and from magnetic switches and motion detectors, that function in the same way as remote controls.

This is very frustrating for us (and for you TellStick Net owners, of course), since our servers are already prepared and have for several months been decoding remote signals that are received. Even before that, the status of devices was actually updated according to remote control signals for a while, but we had to take a step back and recode some parts and beef up the servers to handle the load from additional connections.

What are we going to do about this?

Because of this, we have now decided to activate some of this functionality right away. Don't expect too much. What will happen is that if you control your devices with a remote control using the same house and unit code as a device registered in Telldus Live!, that device will change status to what the remote sends out. You'll have to update the webpage or refresh the devices manually to see this status change.

This is not how we have imagined that it should work, and it is of course still our top priority to get the full system working, but we want to give you some of the functionality now. Even this functionality is sufficient in some cases, but it is necessary that you know the house/unit code from your remotes. Either by using a code switch system, or by scanning your remote with a TellStick Duo (no, we are of course NOT trying to get you to buy a TellStick Duo too, but you might for example have a TellStick Duo equiped friend).

As of today, all our servers have been updated with this feature. Don't think for a second that this will slow down our effort to bring you all the other functionality that you should expect from Telldus Live!.

Group support for TellStick Net

We have just deployed a new function for your TellStick Net. It is the functionality to add groups. This has previously been available for anyone using selflearning remote socket receivers with more than one memory.

With our new group function it is now possible to mix different brands in one group. It is also possible to have two devices in different parts of the world. Say for instance you have a TellStick Net both at home and in your vaccation house. You can with a single click control both locations.

The API for this has been extended with the new functions group/add and group/remove. There is no function for iterating groups. For maintaining backwards compability with thirdparty applications, groups is implemented as ordinary devices. If you want to filter out groups in your application they have a new attribute in devices/list called "type". It is set to "group" for groups and "device" for devices. This is actually very similar to our C-API with tdGetDeviceType().

Happy coding.