Arduino and X-10 home automation

[Valkonen]

Got into Arduino side of things recently and quite enthusiastic about doing things...

I'm also a longtime user of X-10 home automation all over the house including baseboard heater control with OTE-X10 devices all controlled thru an old CM11A. Lately found out that X-10 Corp maybe getting out of this and I'm now worrying about the future of my home automation setup.

Their last model of "send & receive" AND "no permanent PC connection", the CM15A isn't available anymore.
Extensive search over the web rendered real small results.

I'm sure that the capabilities of the Arduino would do fine. Just need to find a PC side program that can send the home automation program & macros to it...

[franklin97355]

Have you looked here http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/x10? If you already have please let us know what you have and have not tried and why it won't work for you.

[Valkonen]

Hi,
I didn't try it yet and will for sure...Thanks for the tip.
What will be missing still is the Windows GUI front end as ActiveHome and the like.
Best regards

[mdn15]

I am also trying to get thie X10 Lib linked above to work. The command module Im using is the CM11A. Any help in getting this to work would be awesome!

[franklin97355]

How are you connecting the module to the arduino? I don't think your module and the ones used in the library use the same communications protocol.

[mdn15]

That is exactly what I did and it did not work. I have been searching for some type of lib that would support the CM11A. I have been unsuccessful. That is why I posted to see if any one has found a fix or new lib. Otherwise, I might be purchasing a different control module

[mdn15]

I just ended up buying the PL513 module from the X10 site. So hopefully it will work right off the bat!

[Valkonen]

I went quite a bit around in search of a GUI front end to my X-10 home automation...
Nothing at all. Guess I will have to design one on my own.

As I was travelling I played with Processing while reading "Visualizing Data" from Ben Fry and it made me think that Processing could be the tool

Let see...

[philba]

Yeah, processing could do it. It's kind of basic when it comes to a GUI, though. You'll probably want to check out the P5 library. Definitely more complicated than something like VB.

By the way, I started playing with Processing because of the Arduino connection but, frankly, any dev environment that allows you to receive and send via a com port will be fine.

[John_NY]

I am also looking to set up an Arduino <-> CM11A interface without resorting to a Serial-to-Ethernet gateway. I currently use a PC with the Perl CM11A library or "heyu", but I am looking to offload those tasks to a LAN-connected Arduino

If you have a working CM11A setup, I would love to see it! If I come up with one of my own, I'll be sure to post it.

-John
(http://github.com/John-NY/)