By incident I found out yesterday that the Miele@mobile app was updated in Google Play back in May. For some reason Pushbullet didn’t notify me, and I’m not allowed to download the app from Google Play myself, since I’m resided in Denmark and Miele@home is not supported here. Strangely, the only visible change I found in this update since 2.01 was a complete Danish translation. Nice – hopefully this means that Miele@home support in Denmark is not too far away. Update, September 6th 2016: I just found out that the geo-restriction in Google Play is also gone, or at least expanded to include Denmark. It’s now also possible to select Miele Denmark as origin for the Miele user account.

Today’s small rant:

• Why this geoblocking? I’m allowed within EU to buy all the hardware in Germany, but the only app that exists for the system, I’m not allowed to use. With my very expensive appliances and Miele@home gateway/modules I might add. Luckily in Android there are ways to get the app anyway, but my girlfriend can’t download the app for iPhone and use the system at all.
• Why not open up the new JSON-RPC API, so better 3rd party apps could be written, that didn’t have to depend only on the old broken Homebus protocol? This would make the system more useful since new ways to use the sytem would arise.

For quite some time, I’ve been holding back a post introducing my Miele@home Android project. So in the wrong order, here’s an attempt to get in touch with some fellow Miele@home geeks: Sharing my findings about the new XGW 3000 firmware upgrade, which was released last week.

My findings are only about the Homebus protocol and multicast packets, since the new JSON-RPC protocol isn’t for public consumption (or so it seems). So here we go – changes since version 2.0.0:

• Element ‘type’ in http://<gateway>/homebus/ seems to be working again (e.g. <type>WMV960</type>). I’ve never seen this work since the original firmware of my gateway (1.1.0).
• Prior to 2.0.3, multicast packets would refer to a ZigBee MAC address (at least when communicating with XKM 3000 Z modules): “id=hdm:ZigBee:<MAC>”. This is now changed to device UID.
• For some devices numeric values are now included in the http://<gateway>/homebus/device XML:

  <key name="State" value="Running" type="state" raw="5"/>
  <key name="Program" value="Cottons" type="program" raw="1"/>
  <key name="Phase" value="Rinses" type="phase" raw="5"/>
  

  This is true for my WMV 960, but not my TKR 350 WP or H 5581 BP. They all have the XKM 3000 Z module, but the WMV has firmware version 1.16, while the other two are version 1.02 (does anyone know if these modules are firmware-upgradeable and/or where to find a changelog?).

Bugs still present:

• Language parameter not respected for http://<gateway>/homebus/device?language=en. Gateway language is always used.
• Bizarre values for key “Start Time”. Will update the post on this later.

That’s it for now. I’ll return later with more information about my project as well as rants about the Homebus protocol and Miele’s secrecy and lack of support.