Chad’s Blog

X10 – what in the world?

Wow, I have to say, the x10 universe is a confusing pile of wowness.. I have been playing around with X10 with one of my old XP boxes I got from work, a Dell Optiplex GX260 (had to get memory, a hard drive, and a cmos battery for it) and X10 Commander (which I also have the X10 Commander iPhone app). I also played with some other programs, but I don’t remember what ones they are, sorry, I dont have that computer in use at the moment, and they were rather… lacking in polish. But the X10 Commander did work for the most part, most of the time. The main problem I had was that generally the app on my phone would load to fast before it could talk to my XP box running the X10 Commander program.. so 9 times out of 10 I would have to go out of the app, and back in just to get it to talk.. But it was still cool to open my garage door, control 8 or so other lights from my iPhone.. Soon I want to be able to run my own app, or web page from any device, and have some parts of that automated, (lights on in the house after dusk at various randomized times for instance) without having to have an extra windows box running just for that. I had moved the X10 Commander over to another GX270 that I had been using for my Amazon Video On Demand, but it only had one comm port, and during the summer I didnt want to leave that box on all the time, as I don’t have Central Air to combad all these pc’s I’d be running. I had found an open source(at least I think it was open source.. or was going to another form of open source) program called Heyu, that seemed pretty straight forward.. Only thing is, it would only work with certain modules, one of them being my RF device, a CM17A. It wouldn’t talk to my serial to power adapters, a IBM Director CM11A or a SmartHome PowerLine 1132B. Now supposedly it should have talked to the CM11A, but I couldn’t get it to work, but it did work for the most part. I really didn’t know if I wanted to use the CM17A or not, I mean it worked great for the most part, at times though I had a hard time getting my remote controller that I used for my car to talk to the house to tell it to open the garage door wouldn’t pick up well, so I had tried to use two RF receivers, and that seemed to help. One day one of my devices stopped picking up the signal to turn on/off.. and I think it has to do with the fact that I ran some more CAT 5 cables for my video cameras that watch the front and back yards, were somehow interfering.. even though those signals went across the regular power lines, I couldn’t understand any other way why and x10 module on that particular circuit wouldn’t work.. I’m still learning about all this cool X10 stuff, but if I cant get it consistent, I may look into doing another style of control, maybe a direct wire hookup, since I have to replace all the 2 wire in my home to the 2 wire with ground anyways..