X-10 Control

Home automation from anywhere. Turn on lights and appliances, check the house temperature, or the pool level. Imagination is about the only practical limit. Let's take a brief tour of a a possible installation. Consider a home with several yard lights, a backyard pool, lights on the driveway by the basketball hoop, a lit front sidewalk, and several rooms on the main floor. Your configuration make look something like this:

In this sample, there are 9 devices that can be controlled. You may also see that they are grouped (A - D) for convenience, so you can control them individually or in sets that you define. To turn on the Garage Security and Porch Lights, just select Group C: On.

For a more customized approach, this tabular listing could be replaced with a graphic that depicts your home and yard layout, with hot-spots where you have remote control. By moving the mouse over the hot-spots, you can turn lamps on and off.

Smartware Computing can customize your system to meet your needs and style.

With additional design services, you can program your lighting for additional automation. For instance,  you can turn on all of your Christmas lights at a certain time of the day, or if you forgot when you went on vacation, you could activate your security lighting scheme after you left home. Depending upon the X-10 system components you have in place, you can also monitor the status of many things around the house.

The real version of this page would run from your home computer, and would be accessible from anywhere in the world if you have a persistent internet connection. With the non-graphic version, you can even control your lights from a PDA or Cell Phone with Web support.

Prerequisites

• Firecracker X-10 Interface
• Installed and operational web server
• Perl installed and configured to serve CGIs from your web

Download Script and the Configuration File

X10.zip

Containing:
cm17a.exe to feed commands to your X-10 system using the Firecracker interface
cm17a.ini configuration file to set the communications port
x10.pl the web script

Configure the Script

Each Script has a number of configuration options. Each should be reasonably self-explanatory, and they are at the top of the file. Perl scripts are delivered in source format, so you can just edit it with Notepad. If you install just as noted in this document, you'll face the minimum number of changes to make it work for you.

Edit the cm17a.ini file and choose the communication port your Firecracker is connected to.