Triggering BI from HCA

[lviperz]

This is probably something that will be way over my head and not sure if I have the patients to do it, but does anyone know if I can have my Home Control Assistant trigger the cameras in BI to record?

Here is a little background and what I would like to do.
I have a simple X10 security system and a HCA (Home Control Assistant) system for automation.
When the X10 alarm system is tripped it sends an All Lights On and All Units Off command over the powerline.
HCA sees this and I can trigger a program to run from this.
Right now that program sends me an email. What I want to do is also tell BI to start recording all cameras.

Is anyone out there familiar with HCA enough to send me in the right direction? I know HCA can execute PC commands but I don't know if it is possible to somehow get those commands in to BI which is running on a different PC. I would assume I would have to somehow get those commands to one of the Digital interfaces that work with BI. If it's possible it would be nice to send an http command to BI.

Thanks

 

[lviperz]

After much research this weekend and a little help from another HCA user, I have found my solution. I need to tweak it but here is the basics. Using a 3rd party program called BIcommand I can send command line triggers to BI using BI's DDE commands. THis worked perfectly as long as my HCA and BI were on the same machine, but they are not. So the next part, which will take some tweaking is to use PsExec from PStools so I can run the bicommand remotely from a different computer. It took me a few hours of tinkering but I finally got my HCA server to send a trigger command to my BI server using PsExec.

This will be fantastic as now I can use my pir motion sensors to trigger cameras. I will post a write up when I get it all working.

 

[lviperz]

Ok, here's the short of it.

My BI is on one computer and my Home Control Assistant is on another. THis is how I got things working.

On my BI server I'm using a add-on tool called BI Command available from http://www.cam-it.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=3
On the download page you can read up on what it is and how to use it. Running it locally on the BI server it works great. But I want to trigger the cameras when certain events happen in my HCA server. So off to the other computer.

In order to runs commands on a remote computer I used a program called PSexec from PStools. You can get it from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx
Now, to use this you need Admin$ access to the remote computer. Since I do not have these internal computers password protected it was difficult at first to use. I didn't try adding passwords because I really didn't want them or need them so I finally got it to work by setting up a persistent share from the command line on the HCA server.

net use \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\Admin$ /user:USERNAME RUNNING BI /persistent:yes

I did not actually use a drive letter because it wasn't needed. Once I did this psexec had access to the BI Command.
Next I created batch commands on the BI server for psexec to execute but that led to more problems. If I simply had psexec run the command directly it worked. So I moved and edited the batch files to my HCA server and use those from within HCA.

One of my basic batch files simply do the following:
psexec \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\path-to-bicommand\bicommand.exe <command> <camshortname1>

Now I just have HCA execute my batch file and the camera is triggered.

Hope others can find this helpful.