The Scheduler

When I started this project, I envisioned the WebCell as the user interface, via web pages, for otherwise self-contained home automation devices. For example, the WebCell might pass on to a thermostat a list of temperatures and times that the user had entered, and the thermostat would handle it, even if the WebCell was subsequently disconnected. In practice, however, the devices I’ve encountered need more supervision – they need a controller to maintain the schedule.

In January 2011, I started the design of the CellScript scheduler. I wanted total flexibility, and used the calendar feature of Microsoft Outlook as a guide for creating recurring schedules. The plan made its way into the CellScript Language Reference, and from there the coding began. By the end of February, the scheduler successfully “fired an event” on time – simulated, of course.

In March I felt the scheduler was in pretty good shape. It was time to write the web pages that would collect the settings and feed them into the scheduler. To help with this I took a class at the nearby community college in cascading style sheets (CSS), which is all about making web pages look the way you want them to.

Still I found writing the web pages to be a major challenge. The pages all use AJAX techniques and YUI 3 to make them as easy to use as possible. I was creating these pages to work with an Insteon irrigation controller and a pair of Insteon thermostats (for two separate furnaces in my house). For each system I had a setup page (irrigation zones, for example), and then a settings page (such as watering time for each zone and watering schedule).

My priority was the irrigation system, because I’d already wired in the Insteon controller. Fortunately we had a very cool and wet spring in Western Washington, giving me more time to get the irrigation pages ready. In late May the WebCell succeeded in starting an irrigation cycle on schedule, which turned out to be about two weeks to spare.

The push to get irrigation running on the WebCell gave me my first real experience with CellScript (as opposed to writing test cases). I did some tweaking and bug fixing before returning to the next set of web pages, for the thermostats. On August 13, 2011, the WebCell took control of the thermostat schedule. Program size is now at 83,464 bytes. And I will be taking a break from WebCell development for a while!