{"id":85,"date":"2004-02-25T16:55:00","date_gmt":"2004-02-25T16:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewebgal.com\/wordpress\/?p=85"},"modified":"2004-02-25T16:55:00","modified_gmt":"2004-02-25T16:55:00","slug":"home-automation-now-on-a-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"Home Automation – now on a Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"

While making the rounds of tech new sites, I ran across
\nHome Automation with Mac OS X, Part 1 by Alan Graham <\/a> on the O’Reilly site.\n<\/p>\n

\nAbout 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.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

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<\/a>).
\nMost 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nFortunately I had put a serial port<\/a> 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n

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!\n<\/p>\n

\nI’ll run the demo a couple more days, but that test pretty much convinced me the Indigo software<\/a> is the one I will buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computertech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewebgal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}