Core and Startup

MisterHouse Core

Here are the basic steps of the MisterHouse program:

1. Read config files and initialise things

2. Setup the OLE Text To Speech (TTS) item or Festival socket port
   Setup the OLE Voice Recognition item or socket to the viavoice_server on linux
   Setup the serial items
   Setup the tcp socket ports

3. Read and evaluate/compile the user event code into the mh_temp.user_code file:
   Optional .mht files are processed by mh/lib/read_table_.pl, creating *.mhp files.
   Objects are evaluated and created.
   Everything else is put into a &user_loop function (at the end of mh_temp.user_code file).\

4. Loop until exit, each pass executing:
   Set global time/date variables
   Check for voice commands
   Read/write socket data
   Read/write serial data
   Check for timers actions
   Check for external command files
   Evaluate the &user_loop function
   Sleep for a while (default is 50 milliseconds), so mh does not hog the CPU.\

MisterHouse Command line options

Here are some examples of the MisterHouse command line options;

Command Line	Meaning
mh	Normal startup
mh -h or mh -htlp	Display help text
mh items.pl test1.pl test2.pl	Only run the 3 specified members
mh -tk 0 -code_dir c:\mh\code\Bruce	Disable the tk interface and change the code dir to the Bruce directory
mh -debug serial > test1.log	Log all 'print' statements to test1.log and turn on all serial related debug messages

MisterHouse Initialisation options

The complete list of valid startup options is in the mh.ini file. This file can be overriden by your own mh.ini file and specified at startup.

Here are a few of the more important ones and their defaults:

code_dir=\mh\code\test Points to the directory that has the user code files in it. This can be a comma delimited set of paths if you want to keep your code files in multiple directories.

html_root=$Pgm_Root/web and html_file=mh_default/index.html Point to where the web interface html files are.

http_port=8080 The built in web server port. Use 80 if you want to use the normal web port (i.e. http://localhost ). If using something other than 80 (because you already have a web server running), add :port to URL (e.g. http://localhost:8080 ).

server_telnet_port=23 Use 23 to enable access via telnet localhost, if you are running the mh/code/common/telnet.pl member. If you use a different port, you can still get to the port with telnet localhost port_number.

diagnostics=1 Set this (or w=1) to enable perl -w warning messages on potential code errors. MisterHouse runs about 10% slower with this option on.

debug= and log= use the -debug and -log and options to turn on debug and/or log the console errata to a file. For example: mh -debug http -log http_socket.log will turn on socket related debug messages and log all errata to the file http_socket.log. You can also stack debug flags, using ; as a separator. for example: mh -debug serial;x10

time_start=, time_stop=, and time_increment= are used to run MisterHouse in 'fast test mode', useful for debugging events. The time_increment parameter sets how many simulated seconds to increment per pass. Default is 60. If only time_start is specified, normal mode will resume when the current time is reached. If time_stop is specified, MisterHouse will exit when reached. These parameters can be any time/date string, as recognised by the time_now function

Here are some examples:

mh -time_start 0 -time_stop 24 -tk 0 -voice_text 0
mh -time_start "6 AM" -time_stop "11 PM" -time_increment 1
mh -time_start "5/14 7:10" -time_stop "5/15 10 PM" -time_increment 300\