2 dreamboxes, 1 motor

[hotbaws11]

Hi,

I have recently installed a motorised sat system and have 2 dreamboxes. I know each dreambox needs its own seperate cable from my quad lnb (i.e. no splitters) but I don't know how to set my system up so that both dreamboxes can control the motor?

Any pointers helpful.

I was thinking of writing a plug in for the second box which would change the channel of the primary dreambox (over the network) to match the second dreambox and thus move the motor for me automatically. I obviously don't want to go to the bother of doing this if there is a simple alternative or if a plugin has already been written for this simple task!

Thanks.

[Curious123]

Imagine what would happen if both the dreamboxes asked the motor to go different satellites? Only one of your dreambox can control the motor. The secondary dreambox will only be able to view the channels available from whichever satellite the dish is currently resting on after being despatched by the primary dreambox.

[hotbaws11]

I understand the potencial issues here but here is an example of what I want this for.

Primary dreambox is in living room and is hooked up to motor.
Secondary dreambox is in bed room.

Therefore at night (when everyone is in bed) how do I change to another satellite in the bedroom if I don't want to acutally get up out of my bed and walk downstairs to switch it over

[westkill]

this should work if unpluged the living room box off at the mains before bed
and
pluged the bedroom box in at night with the same config and settings

[on_the_jazz]

Or use webinterface at night to change the channel on the downstairs box so the dish changes position.
If you know the parameters you could make a script and then use file manager to execute it on the upstairs box. Something like "wget h**p://192.168.0.1/?mode=zap&path==the_id_of_the_channel_to_change_di sh_position" would zap a new channel on box 192.168.0.1 (thats only 1 line though, I assume there's a lot more involved).
Do 2 files, one for an E channel and one for a W channel (or whatever the 2 directions are you use). I've never done this before so please post up the solution if you mess about doing this. Would be good to know.

[hotbaws11]

thanks... I've knocked up a script which gets the channel reference from the local box then changes the channel of the primary box to match it...

I've got it working on telnet but not sure how to integrate it with my image either as a plug in or a script.

I'll keep reading.

[hotbaws11]

Sucess!!!

Posting an update to say that I've installed the flexmenu plugin on my secondary 500 and modified shellexec.conf menu to point to a new script in var/bin which changes channel on my primary box to match that of my secondary box.

Bear in mind that this sort of plugin is only useful whn noone is watching the primary box as they might be quite annoyed by you changing the channel they were watching... especially the wife!!!

Here is my patched together code to get the current channel of the secondary box and change the primary channel via the web interface.

Note: I had to disable http authentication on my primary box as I have no idea how to get wget to log in with a username and password.

#!/bin/sh

# get the current steam info (i.e. channel) from local box
wget -O /var/tmp/steaminfo.html http://192.168.123.157/xml/streaminfo

# extract the channel reference from steam info
VAR=`sed -n '/reference/ p' /var/tmp/steaminfo.html | sed s/.\<reference\>// | sed s/.\<.reference\>//`

echo $VAR

MYVAR1="http://192.168.123.7/cgi-bin/zapTo?path="
MYVAR2="&curBouquet=0&curChannel="

# change channel on primary box connected to motor to match that of local box
wget -O /var/tmp/changechannel.txt $MYVAR1$VAR$MYVAR2

any questions or pointers how to make something easier/better... just post as ideally I would like to do it with 1 or 2 button presses but obviously happy I can do this at all