A couple years ago I bought a little X10 home automation package
from x10.com because they had a little starter kit available for
about $6 (incl shipping, iirc); it sat in the box until today
when the topic came up on IRC and I went to dig it up.
It turned out to be very easy to install: just plug in a tiny
black box ("firecracker") into a serial port on my computer,
attach a white box to a lamp or other appliance, another white
box with a little antenna somewhere else on the 110V circuit
(dunno what the range is, but it worked downstairs as well),
then "apt-get install bottlerocket" and I could turn the lamp
on/off using shell commands. (e.g. "br A2 ON")
There are a ton of other tools for doing more complicated stuff,
incl various GUIs with different features. The only other one I
have used is wmx10 (also apt-gettable), which has a tiny gui
that lets me dim my lamp. (haven't gotten dimming to work with
bottlerocket yet)
This package also came with a standalone remote control that can
control up to 20 devices around the house; just need to buy a
little white box for each appliance.
I scheduled an at(1) job to turn my lamp on tomorrow morning
(timed to match the third snooze cycle on my alarm clock :)
I should get a strobe light!
http://www.google.com/search?q=x10+firecracker+linux
->
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/
> BottleRocket
> Home Automation Software for the X10 FireCracker kit
:
> FireCracker Information
> * What is the X10 FireCracker kit?
> The X10 Firecracker kit is a simple wireless home automation
> system, consisting of a lamp module, an appliance module/radio
> receiver, a hand held wireless transmitter and a wireless
> transmitter that plugs into a standard RS-232 serial port. Using
> either the handheld transmitter or the serial port transmitter, a
> user can turn on or off any of up to 256 appliances, and
> brighten/dim any of those that happen to be lamps and plugged into
> the special lamp modules. Each appliance to be controlled must be
> plugged into its own module, and each module is set (by turning
> dials on the front) to a unique address by which it is identified.
> Software can also be downloaded from X10 to control the modules
:
> BottleRocket Overview
> + What is BottleRocket?
> BottleRocket is a command-line interface for Unix systems to
> use the FireCracker kit. It is easy to use, has all of the
> major (non-gui) functionality of the Windows interface, is
> easy to call from scripts and the backend code is made to be
> easily linked into other programs.
p.s. Bottle Rocket (1996) is a very cool movie, co-written by and
starring Owen Wilson (of Zoolander, Meet the Parents, etc.)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0115734
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Wilson,+Owen
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/