[NBLUG/talk] Setting up X-10 home automation

[Kyle Rankin]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 10:31:59PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> I've looked at Smarthome.com and X10.com; I haven't checked HSC, but I'm 
> pretty sure I haven't seen this kind of stuff there).  I checked Radio Shack 
> and Sears, as they were rumored to have X-10 hardware (there was a discussion 
> of X-10 at a meeting of the North Coast Macintosh Users Group several months 
> ago), and I found pretty much everything EXCEPT computer interfaces at Radio 
> Shack, and I found absolutely nothing at Sears, online or in the store.  For 
> obvious reasons, I have not purchased any X-10 hardware yet.
> 
> 
> I do see one possible problem with using any of these computer interfaces in 
> my existing setup: as far as I can tell, all of them use a legacy serial 
> port, and the computer I'd like to use to control everything only has one 
> serial port, and it's currently connected to a Palm HotSync cradle.  This 
> means that I'd need to do one of three things:
> 
> 1. Switch to a USB Palm HotSync cradle (I have one in my garage, but I never 
> got it to work on Linux).
> 2. Find a USB computer interface (and a Linux program that can interact with 
> it).
> 3. Get a USB-to-Serial adapter (probably the easiest solution).
> 
> 
> And so the plot thickens...
> 
> 
> -- 
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
> 
> A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything,
> should conceal it as well as she can.
> 		-- Jane Austen
> 

If you need the specialty X-10 stuff like the serial port controller, try
Fry's. The closest one is probably the one down in San Jose off of Brokaw.
They have a whole aisle of X-10 stuff including the computer interface and
a bunch of other things.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org