Open source Home Control box?

Post by **Bwired** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 5:46 pm

I think the Home Control Box is still owned by Home Automation Europe and not Eaton.
www.homeautomationeurope.com

Post by **MindBender** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 9:06 am

I've sent them my inquiry mail as well.

As Marcel found pointed out and supported by the Thesis he has found, early models of the Home Control Box were based on Mr. House. Depending on their implementation, their entira may, or may not, be subjected to the GPL. I will drop Bruce an email too.

Post by **JaapK** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 7:49 am

The funniest thing just happened... [:O]

I decided to upgrade the firmware on my hcb (hey, what better thing to do on a sunday morning at 06:30?).
Downloaded the firmware from the Xanura website. This firmware comes in a zip file, and if you unzip it you end up with the firmware (firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb).
MacOS X's unpacker finds that this in itself is an archive, and continues to unpack. The result is a folder full of perl scripts, configuration files, package lists ...
My knowledge of Linux is rather basic, my understaning of Perl is even less, but i think there's a lot of interesting information here. Enjoy! [:)]

Post by **Noel** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:02 am

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by JaapK</i>
<br />The funniest thing just happened... [:O]

I decided to upgrade the firmware on my hcb (hey, what better thing to do on a sunday morning at 06:30?).
Downloaded the firmware from the Xanura website. This firmware comes in a zip file, and if you unzip it you end up with the firmware (firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb).
MacOS X's unpacker finds that this in itself is an archive, and continues to unpack. The result is a folder full of perl scripts, configuration files, package lists ...
My knowledge of Linux is rather basic, my understaning of Perl is even less, but i think there's a lot of interesting information here. Enjoy! [:)]<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></font id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Do you have an URL?
--
<h6>Anyone interested in time travel meet me here last Thursday!!</h6>

Post by **JaapK** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 10:47 am

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by wifi</i>
Do you have an URL?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></font id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Just download the firmware from the Xanura website and unzip it. Then untar the resulting .hcb file.

http://www.xanurahome.nl/installateur/P ... 15-983.zip

Post by **Snelvuur** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 1:35 pm

you can indeed read it, but the underlying system (the o.s. part) which it runs on is not there. Even though you can make changes in this, you cannot change the o.s. itself by adding functionality to that. For instance i would go about getting ssh up and running, so you can logon to your own box.

I do see, ftp , openssl and ftp packages and curl (wget alike)

I dont know much about the box, but if it runs this, you can also just add a new .ipk file for ssh and rewrite the /etc/passwd to gain entrance...

// Erik (binkey.nl)

Post by **MindBender** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 9:09 pm

You're right, it's just a zipped gzipped tar archive:

$> file firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.zip
firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

$> unzip firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.zip
Archive: firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.zip
inflating: firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb

$> file firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb
firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Fri Aug 1 15:46:29 2008

$> gzip -dS.hcb firmware-eh_1.4.15-983.hcb

$> file firmware-eh_1.4.15-983
firmware-eh_1.4.15-983: POSIX tar archive

$> tar -xvf firmware-eh_1.4.15-983
...long list of file...

An interesting detail:
$> find . -type f|xargs grep misterhouse
./hcb/bin/hcb: # Allow for . in dir name (e.g. misterhouse-2.26)
./hcb/lib/handy_utilities.pl:# Bruce Winter bru**********ouse.net
./hcb/lib/handy_utilities.pl:# http://misterhouse.net/mh/lib/handy_utilities.pl
./hcb/lib/site/Device/Device-SerialPort.html:Ported to linux/POSIX by Joe Doss for <a href="http://www.misterhouse.net/">MisterHouse</a><br>

Post by **Noel** » Sun Oct 12, 2008 9:24 pm

bruce(at)misterhouse.net is going to love the spam now his email address is posted on a forum (NOT)

--
<h6>Anyone interested in time travel meet me here last Thursday!!</h6>

Post by **RDNZL** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:52 am

All this was already known, old News. Bruce is even contacted about the fact that hcb is a misterhouse ripoff...
(the bin/hcb script is the same as bin/mh for a large part.)
Read the start of this thread.

Developing DomotiGa - Gambas powered Domotics.

Post by **MindBender** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 9:13 am

And besides the MrHouse related scripts, the archive doesn't contain many exciting details...

I knew Bruce was aware of this product, but he seems to have a very relaxed attitude towards this. Because my requests for the source code have remained unanswered, I have brought this to the attions of GPL-Violations.org and they have assigned a trouble ticket (#2319) to this case. These guys usually negotiate silently, so we can assume people are working on it.

Post by **RDNZL** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 9:20 am

I haven't seen hardly any post of Bruce on the mh mailinglist in the last year, maybe longer... I also unsubscribed myself from it recently, there are no groundbreaking features developed in the last year I think... the rest of the HA software is catching up...

As far as I can see they didn't use the stuff I have added to MH in the last years... (which wasn't a lot) but if they did, I would become more active in having them their mistakes fixed.

Developing DomotiGa - Gambas powered Domotics.