Temperature monitoring in Homeseer with Dallas 1 Wire Part two

Here are some screen shots of a working Dallas 1-wire system using MCSXAP interfacing to Homeseer.

This is a screen shot of the DS9490 XAP connector.

The serial number is unique to every single 1-wire device.

I have 9 devices around the house.

The name, such as “bedroom” is the name that the device will have in Homeseer.  I changed the poll to 30 seconds as I didn’t see any need for it to be faster.

I did try Michael’s Hub service but it wouldn’t work, so I tried xFX hub by Edward Pearson which also runs as service, but you can also run it from a command prompt if you want to see what’s going on:

If you run the console version - you can see what’s happening.  After about 30 seconds to 1 minute you should see you 1-wire connector and your Homeseer connectors connect and register, and also the message viewer:

Edward also wrote the XAP message viewer which is very handy for capturing and viewing XAP messages.  If you are running it on a different PC, you will also need to install an XAP hub. If its on same PC as everything else (as in my case) run launch it:

Here’s my basic explanations of what you are looking at (as I didn’t get it at first)

At the top level you see the different “Vendors” (my term), One being “XFX” (Edward Pearson) and the other “mcs” (Michael McSharry).

The next level down is the connectors that it can see:

For mcs we can see Michael's OneWire connector and his Xap homeseer plugin

For xFX we see Edwards Hub and his viewer (the tool we are using)

Drilling down onto the OneWire connector we can see all the messages being transmitted from my sensors on the XAP network.

Its the MCS Homeseer plugin that listens and processes these messages into Homeseer.

Every XAP device sends out periodic heartbeats - you can set events for missing heartbeats which is handy for ensuring all this is working.

Clicking on one of the messages from the 1-wire sensors we can look at an individual message - the text is the actual temperature reading of the sensor:

Here’s what the plugin looks like in Homeseer - I’m the first to admit that it feels a bit clunky and in my experience it didn’t work for a while and then suddenly sprang into life.

Hopefully my screen shots will serve as a reference of a working system. The documentation says click “show only accepted” but on a new system where you haven’t accepted anything yet (Clicking on the “A” column) - you wont see anything, so I recommend you leave it unticked all the time.   Hit “QUERY DSC” to scan the XAP network and poplate the screen.

When a new device appears simply tick the “A” checkbox and click save changes at the top. The plugin will populate the “DC” (device code), Location and Name  automatically - Do not manually enter anything into these boxes (it looks like it works and then will break later!!)

Continued on next page