Floorplan display, filter devices capability ...

[DrCoolzic]

First of all I have several ideas for enhancement do you prefer them as separate requests or group them all?

Floor planning capability and devices selection

It would be nice to be able to display a floorplan image of a house so that it is possible to place Zigbee devices in their actual location in the floorplan.

For this to work in a multi-story house, we need a way to specify a specific floor that will select a specific background image and to be able to simply filter the ZigBee devices associated with that floor.
For example :

• Ground floor => picture ground.jpg + devices from the following zone list: hall, family, kitchen, etc.
• first floor => picture first.jpg + objects from the following list: master bedroom, child's bedroom, bathroom, etc.

Example of Ubiquiti Unifi software

The use model for adding the devices to their proper location can follow what is done by Ubiquiti:
The Unifi network control software offers the following capability:

• display a floorplan (actually it offer the capability to draw walls etc. but not very useful in our context)
• In the floorplan window there is a "place device" button that open a window that allows to select a device from a list of Wifi devices to be placed (initially all the devices) and to "drop" this device in the floorplan. Once placed the object is removed from the list of objects to be placed. Each object has a shape corresponding to its function.
  

Possible use model

In Zigzag have

• a floorplan button that allow to specify a list of floors with following information
  -- floor name i.e. ground floor
  -- floor picture i.e. ground_floor.png
  -- list of areas associated with this floor. I.e. hall, family, kitchen
• Create buttons for each of the defined floor. Once a floor is selected
  -- have a "place devices" button that open a window containing a graphical list of all devices that belong to this floor
  -- provide a drag and drop capability to place the devices on the flooeplan

steps

What I describe here is a kind "ultimate UI solution" that would be probably difficult to implement.
Therefore it is possible to provide some of these functionalities with a simpler interface e.g. using some yaml configuration file

[andrus2049]

If somebody has more than a one floor level, using a 2D representation it wouldn't be possible to show all the zigbee connections across all the house levels...

[DrCoolzic]

Good point.
In that case the solution is to show devices from different floors either using dotted line and/or shaded icons.

With the floorplan capability. You can also have a "see all levels" option that would display all devices from all floors.
In this case you may also want to display devices from different floors with different colors

Actually I already posted a request for different colors here #6
Need to update as follow

Device background:

• not available : background = red
• available
  -- Coordinator: background in blue
  -- Router: background in yellow
  -- End-device: background in green

Device outline:

definable outline color based on floor
For example

• 1st floor: outline black
• 2nd floor: outline blue

[andrus2049]

I'd suggest also to use different shapes for the different types of zigbee devices, like it was in first zigzag version, it's more immediate to get the distinction.

[DrCoolzic]

yep.
Following forms square, circle, octagon gives maximum areas. In that case background colors can be removed or used for floor level.

Samantha: for not available may be an icon with a stop sign?

[Samantha-uk]

All fantastic ideas.
At present my time is being totally absorbed by rebasing Zigzag as an addon, both to allow easier installation via Supervisor and to allow for a number of backend features on the roadmap (such as near real time updating of LQI, power level analysis and such things to help it become a more powerful diagnostic tool).

[DrCoolzic]

No hurry. What you are working on is more important. I also see Zigzag as a possible diagnostic tool to help in case of problems.
I see there is v0.8 new features?

[energywave]

I also thinked about that exact possibility. I have a three story house + cellar so 4 layers. Not an easy representation but the best one is what you said: dashed lines from devices on the shown story that are going to other floors.
But, hey, that's would be an awesome feature but very time consuming to code!
Better to concentrate to optimize and give it as a more user friendly option like ad addon, that would be super useful!
If you consider we have a map with ZHA that's very very bad and ZigZag, as of today with all the limits, is a magnitude of times better than that! Let's people find it and use it!

[DrCoolzic]

Agree ZigZag is already far better than the ugly ZHA map.