Let’s get this party started
Goal
After picking up my Craigslist acquired X-10 gear I wanted to get a feel for the products with some basic testing. I chose to jump right in and control my Oscillating Fan with my Windows PC. To make this happen I used the Cm11A (translates commands from your PC into X-10 Power Line protocol) and an AM466 appliance module.
Theory
In this test I want the Appliance Module to turn on and off when I send the appropriate commands through the Power Line. The tricky part of this will be in getting my PC to talk to the CM11A.
How to
I do plan to always use a PC to control my X-10 setup, but not the with the X-10 software. As such I installed the open source program Mister House. The install went well, I used my browser and went to http://127.0.0.1:8800 to see the Mister House web interface. The problem was I could not figure out how to tell it that I had a Cm11A and that I wanted it to turn off my fan. I quickly abandoned this effort. Not that there is a problem with Mister House, I just didn’t want to spend the time to learn the program for my quick test.
Next, I downloaded the Active Home software (not Active Home Pro) and installed it. I had to tell it what com port to use to talk to the CM11A. There is a communication test you can do to ensure you are talking to the CM11A. This feature was very helpful to ensure I had the right serial connector and the right com port. I did not reboot as the install program recommended and got some wackiness as a result. Once I rebooted it seemed to work well. The device appliance module makes a noticeable click when coming on and off but seemed to work without issue.
After seeing this work as expected, I moved the Cm11A from my windows machine to my linux machine. I have a PC on 24/7 to record TV using the MythTV application, mythbuntu is the specific distribution I am using, which is obviously derived from Ubuntu. I plan on using this machine to also run my home automation system. There are several linux tools that can talk to the CM11A, I chose the heyu application because there seemed to be a lot of reference to this app in my Google search results and it has a simple command line interface. I had to enable the serial port in my BIOS, the BIOS said it would be COM1 (This is a Dell GX270). I then used Google to figure out that COM1 in linux-speak is ttyS0. The first command to try in heyu is ‘heyu info’. If you CM11A is talking to your PC you will see a bunch of information. If they aren’t talking you sill see nothing.
ray@Myth:~$ heyu info Heyu version 2.6.0 Configuration at /etc/heyu/x10.conf Powerline interface on /dev/ttyS0 Firmware revision Level = 1 Interface battery usage = 0:01 (hh:mm) Raw interface clock: Mon, Day 151, 01:06:28 (--> Civil Time: Mon 01 Jun 2009 01:06:28 MST) No schedule has been uploaded by Heyu. Housecode = A 0 = off, 1 = on, unit 16.......8...4..1 Last addressed device = 0x0200 (0000000000100000) Status of monitored devices = 0xa682 (0000001110111000) Status of dimmed devices = 0x3d19 (1111110010001000) ray@Myth:~$
Then I can issue the command to turn my fan off then on:
ray@Myth:~$ heyu off A5 ray@Myth:~$ heyu on A5
Note that there is no confirmation this worked. Most of the appliance modules are one way, they only receive. I have seen appliance modules that will report status, but they are quite expensive.
Conclusion
This worked as advertised. Some things I did to stack the deck in my favor were to ensure I am had both the Cm11A and appliance module on the same circuit (both outlets stop working when I blow one breaker). This minimizes the chance of noise and attenuation, and rules out the dreaded problem of being on the wrong phase.
Of the apps I tried, heyu is by far my preffered method. It is strait to the point. I issue commands on the CLI and it sends them via X10. This seems to have the fewest layers of abstraction between me and the X-10 devices.
Leave a Reply