HDR-Fox T2 with Home Assistant?

I

Ian Manning

Member
Are any other Fox T2 users out there using Home Assistant? If so, I was wondering if you had any useful automation ideas to share?

It would be useful to detect the current operational state of the Humax from within HA (i.e. playback, recording, idle, which channel is selected), but I have no idea whether that is possible??
 
Can HA tie in to MQTT? I have a (now old version) package for the latter, but other things got in the way of any further development.
Then 'all' you need is something to tie the status to MQTT.
 
prpr said:
Can HA tie in to MQTT? I have a (now old version) package for the latter, but other things got in the way of any further development.
Then 'all' you need is something to tie the status to MQTT.
Click to expand...
Yes HA works well with MQTT. But not sure how/if the Humax does?
 
Ian Manning said:
But not sure how/if the Humax does?
Click to expand...
There's a package for it - Mosquitto 1.6.15 - which you'll need to install.
After that you're kind of on your own to concoct the necessary infrastructure.
If you're interested and capable, I can upload it to the repository for you.
I know nothing about HA I'm afraid.
 
prpr said:
There's a package for it - Mosquitto 1.6.15 - which you'll need to install.
After that you're kind of on your own to concoct the necessary infrastructure.
If you're interested and capable, I can upload it to the repository for you.
I know nothing about HA I'm afraid.
Click to expand...
Thanks - I already run a Mosquitto service on another machine. Does the Humax/Custom FW publish or subscribe to MQTT topics? If so, does anyone know of a guide for it?
 
prpr said:
No. That's why you need the package. It has the client bit and the server bit, but obviously you'd only need the client.

There isn't one. You'd have to write it!
Click to expand...
I'd like to have a go at installing it, so if you could direct me to it that would be great.

What functions/information on the Humax does it give access to?
 
It doesn't. It just enables you (or somebody) to construct something to do so.
It's like giving you the bricks to build the house, rather than giving you the house already built. The design of the house is obviously up to the user of the bricks.
Anyway, mosquitto package uploaded. It's a set of command line tools.
 
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Ah OK thanks. Unfortunately I don't have the smarts to work out how to get the Humax to start publishing MQTT topics. So I guess there isn't much I'll be able to do to get it talking to HA :0(
 
Ian Manning said:
Unfortunately I don't have the smarts to work out how to get the Humax to start publishing MQTT topics.
Click to expand...
I doubt it! Especially if you break it down into small baby steps:

First install and play with the Mosquito package,
See if you can work out how to publish a simple "Hello world" message that can be seen by HA

Once the basic communication is established you can then start to think about extracting information from the humax.

If you type status on a Humax command line you will see the same information that is reported on the webif screen about what is being watched/ played /recorded.

I haven't looked at Mosquito but If you are lucky you can pipe that output straight into Mosquito to publish it with MQTT, something like
status | mosquito topic ...
If you are unlucky it might require a bit of simple programming to format the output into MQTT messages, any programming language could be used but most of the webif is programmed using a language know as jimTCL

Once you have got that working you can add it to crontabs to have the humax status published every minute.

Help will be available via the forums if needed

Then you can start to get fancy and think what else you could do ;)
 
Thanks - I'll take a look at jimTCL.

I suppose my first project would be to enhance the HA automation I currently have for my video doorbell. So for example, when someone presses the doorbell:
  • check whether the TV is turned on
  • If so, and the humax is in playback mode
- Pause playback
- Switch the source on the AV receiver to the Chromecast
- Cast the doorbell video to the Chromecast
 
Ian Manning said:
Thanks - I'll take a look at jimTCL.

I suppose my first project would be to enhance the HA automation I currently have for my video doorbell. So for example, when someone presses the doorbell:
  • check whether the TV is turned on
  • If so, and the humax is in playback mode
- Pause playback
- Switch the source on the AV receiver to the Chromecast
- Cast the doorbell video to the Chromecast
Click to expand...
You could probably accomplish most of that without needing any status information from the Humax, you could blindly send an IR PAUSE command to the Humax without actually needing to know whether or not it was playing a recording at the time, pausing live TV while dealing with the door bell would also be desirable.

As I said before break it down into small steps before you try and integrate them together, you can add the refinements once you have the basics working, You don't need to look at jimTCL or mosquito until you know you can automate casting the doorbell video to the TV (and switch back again afterwards)
 
Thanks for the feedback. I already have the casting of the doorbell video to the TV working (via Chromecast). I'd just prefer it to pause Humax playback before it switches to the Chromecast if we're watching something.

When you say "send an IR PAUSE command to the Humax" - what method/protocol were you thinking of?
 
MymsMan said:
If you are lucky you can pipe that output straight into Mosquito to publish it with MQTT, something like
status | mosquito topic ...
Click to expand...
This works:
status|mosquitto_pub -h host -t humax/1/status -s
obviously replacing host with the host name or IP address of your MQTT server, and changing the topic to suit. It's raw, but it gets you going.
 
prpr said:
This works:
status|mosquitto_pub -h host -t humax/1/status -s
obviously replacing host with the host name or IP address of your MQTT server, and changing the topic to suit. It's raw, but it gets you going.
Click to expand...
You could also easily monitor the contents of log files
Code: 
tail -n 0 -f /mod/tmp/activity.log |mosquitto_pub -h host -t humax/1/activity -s &
tail -n 1 -f /mod/tmp/crash.log |mosquitto_pub -h host -t humax/1/crash -s  &
tail -f /mod/tmp/notify.log |mosquitto_pub -h host -t humax/1/notifications -s &
to monitor system activity, crashes and notifications (the red popup warnings on webif)
The -n option controls how many existing messages are included
It would be best to create a /mod/etc/init.d/S99mosquito executable file with the commands to start the monitoring at boot time
 
Thanks for the feedback. My instinct is that querying the status only when required would be a more efficient method than firing off MQTT requests all day, when they're not actually used 99% of the time. Assuming that there's no way of getting Humax events like "playback" to trigger commands, is there any way to initiate a command using an HTTP request? For example, an HTTP request to trigger the status command, which publishes its output to MQTT?
 
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