x10 and ruby?

[Ian Morrison]

hi all,

i'm interested in using x10 and a home automation project to play around
with ruby. i see that a couple of years ago there was talk on this list
about that, and before that hal fulton had some experimental code to
talk to a cm11a controller. i found the cm17a firecracker module, but
that's a very primitive subset in x10 - i'm more interested in having
sensors around the house that run ruby methods in response to events.
is this something that anyone here has experimented with? aside from
the firecracker module which is very minimal, i've not found anything
that i could hook up to a cm12a (i'm in the UK) to take a picture when
someone climbs in through the window.

any pointers would be appreciated,


ian

 

[Rick DeNatale]

hi all,

i'm interested in using x10 and a home automation project to play around
with ruby. i see that a couple of years ago there was talk on this list
about that, and before that hal fulton had some experimental code to
talk to a cm11a controller. i found the cm17a firecracker module, but
that's a very primitive subset in x10 - i'm more interested in having
sensors around the house that run ruby methods in response to events.
is this something that anyone here has experimented with? aside from
the firecracker module which is very minimal, i've not found anything
that i could hook up to a cm12a (i'm in the UK) to take a picture when
someone climbs in through the window.

any pointers would be appreciated,

I'm pretty sure that the cm12x is the same as the cm11a except for
voltage and plug type, i.e. it has the same computer interface
protocol.

I'm mildly interested in the same question about X10 support in Ruby.
I currently use Misterhouse for some primitive HA, but it's a big
honking lump of perl code which I haven't looked at since I installed
it several years ago.

A ruby based replacement for Misterhouse could be sweet, although I'm
not sure I want to spend much time getting such a thing started.

 

[Hal Fulton]

i'm interested in using x10 and a home automation project to play around
with ruby. i see that a couple of years ago there was talk on this list
about that, and before that hal fulton had some experimental code to
talk to a cm11a controller. i found the cm17a firecracker module, but
that's a very primitive subset in x10 - i'm more interested in having
sensors around the house that run ruby methods in response to events.
is this something that anyone here has experimented with? aside from
the firecracker module which is very minimal, i've not found anything
that i could hook up to a cm12a (i'm in the UK) to take a picture when
someone climbs in through the window.

I'm happy that some people are interested in this. I tried 4 or 5
years ago to garner some interest, and there was little.

Let me know when you come up with something.

I realized ages ago that Domo would never happen, because no one
else wanted to work on it, and it's a multi-person project.

What's much more realistic is to get Ruby scripting working
with HomeSeer (www.homeseer.com) one way or another.
That's my current dream.


Hal

 

[Rick DeNatale]

There's also a linux command line interface to the cm11a called heyu2
(there was an earlier heyu). I don't know if it's portable to other
platforms, but it's written in C.

I guess that might be a candidate to be wrapped.

 

[Hal Fulton]

Umm, I just looked into this, and HomeSeer is simply an application that
talks to whatever home controller you already have.

Yes, and Ruby is just for controlling your CPU.

If you have a CM11A or
1132U for X-10, HomeSeer knows how to talk to it. So from a Ruby
perspective, we might as well simply write a home controller in pure Ruby
that talks to the X-10 controllers.

What I mean is HomeSeer isn't necessary -- if we intend to write a Ruby
controller to talk to X-10 interfaces, we might as well do that directly.

If that were true, I would agree. But that is about 2% of its
functionality.

It controls many kinds of hardware other than X10, including Z-wave,
Xantech, Slink-e, and others. It handles speech recognition and speech
synthesis (thru Microsoft Agent, but the integration is smooth and
seamless). It has a built-in scheduler, a built-in web server, a rich
API, telephone control, a COM interface, and a huge pile of code written
for it (thousands of user-contributed scripts -- unfortunately in VB).

Also, a bit off our topic, it appears that HomeSeer is a Windows program.
Not much use to me, assuming I wanted to go that route.

True. That's a thorn in my side as well.

That is why my plan was to wrap the COM interface with Ruby (half of
which is easy, the other half tricky), and then tie that to drb.

Then you'd not only have a Ruby interface, but a remote one. It could
be used to write controlling apps as Linux command line apps, web apps,
or GUIs.

I have a very basic PC-based home controller that turns my lights on and off
quasi-randomly when I am on the road (also I can dial into my house
remotely and control the house using my installed X-10 stuff, plus I can
look at some TV camera outputs, sort of check up on things). I could easily
have created something much more ambitious if I had felt the need, but I
lost interest once I realize how annoyingly unreliable and tricky the X-10
stuff is.

I think it wold be very easy to create an X-10 based home controller using
Ruby and a GUI front end (I mean, if I were not so lazy). I think it would
end up looking much like HomeSeer.

It would if you do the other 98% also.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like Windows either. I use it for HomeSeer,
for Second Life, and for one or two other programs such as Spades.

But, considering it runs on Windows, HS is good software. It's the best
home automation software I've seen -- better than misterhouse,
smarthouse, Cyberhome, HAL, Home Director, the X10 thingy, or anything
else I've looked at. Just my opinion.


Hal

 

[Hal Fulton]

Hal Fulton wrote:

/ ...




Well, thanks for setting me straight on HomeSeer. I didn't realize the
effort level they've gone to. It sounds quite powerful.

Too bad it's married to Windows, as so much is these days.

Yes... I'd love to have a Linux equivalent.

I dreamed of using Festival for speech synthesis and Sphinx for
voice recognition... trouble is, I couldn't get these to work
on their own, much less integrated with each other and a third
controller.

I once outlined something I called "Domo" -- but it will never
be written. I removed the link from my page, but it's still at
http://rubyhacker.com/domo.html

Some people were confused by my use of the word "server" -- I
meant it in the software sense, not the hardware. Although
the processes could be split among boxes, they could also all
run on the same box.


Hal

 

[jtb]

Is there a way to use Ruby to control/monitor actions on a PC using a
RS-232 connection?
If so, that might be one way to build home monitoring devices without
having to pay for the homeseer products.