Welcome! You have either made it to this site because you are looking for information about home automation, x10 products, OR you made it here by accident at which point you are probably thinking something like 'GEEK' and closing your browser.
Well, I don't claim to be a home automation expert by any means. I've only recently began playing with X10 goodies. I do however claim to be a very cool guy, which is really neither here nor there because you don't care. Just thought I would throw that out there.
So far I've automated a good chunk of the lighting in my house, complete with motion sensitivity and timed events. The motion sensitivity was easy enough, they make modules for that. The timed events however was much funner because I got to get down and dirty with Perl, XML, a firecracker module and a program called BottleRocket.
My script runs off on a Linux machine from cron every minute. It'd be nicer to daemonize it, but so far it's working great as it is. Anyway, until it stops working I'm gonna live with it running from cron. Before I continue, I am a firm believer of giving credit where credit is due. Tom Watson, a coworker, had written the original program that did on/off and worked from a pipe delimited flat file. I took that initial idea and wrote a program that does the same thing using an XML config file. I added the ability to do dim+/dim- as well as added the ability to only do things on certain days. Generally speaking, I increased the size of Tom's program by almost 900%. I should also mention that it runs a bit slower as well. BUT, hopefully soon there will be a web interface to mine which will be very cool. I've put the program up for download on the Lighter2 page. Anyway, it was Tom that got me into this stuff, so my girlfriend can blame him for all the time I've spent on it, and the occasional prank of logging in from work and flickering the lights on and off... She was not happy...
Anyway, I will have some documentation and links to other sites. I've noticed that a handful of people have information out there about various things so I'm gonna try to get it all meshed into my site as I get around to doing each thing.
The first thing being disabling that damn annoying dusk/dawn sensor on my RMS18 HawkEye Motion Sensor
This File was last updated March 2 2005
