While making the rounds of tech new sites, I ran across
Home Automation with Mac OS X, Part 1 by Alan Graham on the O’Reilly site.
About 7 years ago I got a Firecracker kit from X10. I played with it a bit, loaded software on my PC, quickly added $120 of expansion parts, and had the house lighting and coffeemaker on schedules in short order.
But the X10 was creaky. If I shut down my PC for a few days, I noticed the interface clock started to drift right away, and events started occuring at unwanted times. Even on a good day, some lights didn’t come on regularly, and for one wallswitch, the only way to know it was on was to flip it by hand.
But as long as I already had the hardware, and have a shiney new G4, I thought I’d look into some Mac versions of the software. (I posted some of the ones I found on a page of links up at Mac Auto).
Most of them have Demo versions so you can test the software before you buy it – thats good as it let me write off some of that software pretty fast. I’m just not interested in running software under OS 8 or other Mac Classic Environment.
Fortunately I had put a serial port in the mac, so once I found a Mac serial (DIN) to db9 cable in my “box of spares”, I could connect the Mac to the old CM11 interface box and inject commands into the house wiring.
I tested the system by turning my desklight (A8) on and off via software, and I saw that when I toggled it on and off with the remote, the lamp status was updated on the screen. Once I knew that worked, I created all the “devices” that I knew were controllable in the house. Then I created scripts for “Sunset: Turn on Front Light”, “Weekday Start Coffee”, and Weekend Start Coffee” (the Windows software didn’t allow me to differentiate like that.
Last night, I set up the coffee maker with fresh ground coffee and filled it with water. This morning, I was very pleased to find the coffeemaker had run on schedule, and fresh coffee awaited me!
I’ll run the demo a couple more days, but that test pretty much convinced me the Indigo software is the one I will buy.