Luke Smith

A few months ago I purchased some X10 modules to automate my house, being able to
turn the lights on and off with a remote control from bed is probably the greatest
application so far.

But in the old house I wrote some software which interfaced with a CM12U device; from
my computer I was able to send commands via RS232 serial communication to the powerlines
in the house and so onto the modules planted around the house. Being a geek I made
it easy to make and run any macro (using the wonders of XML), a set of commands run
in order to set any number of X10 modules. Movie mode was the best; turning off the
living room light, turning on the lava lamp, and dimming the lamp to a preset value
(defined in the macro).

xml version=“1.0“ encoding=“utf-8“?>
<Macro xmlns:xsi=“http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance“ xmlns:xsd=“http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema“>
   <Name>Movie
mode</Name>
   <Description>Turns
the lava lamp on, the main light off and dims the lamp to 13</Description>
   <Commands>
      <X10CommandSet HouseCode=“B“ Device=“Three“>
         <DeviceName>Main
Light</DeviceName>
         <Functions>
            <X10FunctionCommand Function=“Off“ Value=“0“ />
         </Functions>
      </X10CommandSet>
      <X10CommandSet HouseCode=“B“ Device=“One“>
         <DeviceName>lava
lamp</DeviceName>
         <Functions>
            <X10FunctionCommand Function=“On“ Value=“0“ />
         </Functions>
      </X10CommandSet>
      <X10CommandSet HouseCode=“B“ Device=“Two“>
         <DeviceName>lamp</DeviceName>
         <Functions>
            <X10FunctionCommand Function=“On“ Value=“0“ />
            <X10FunctionCommand Function=“Dim“ Value=“13“ />
         </Functions>
      </X10CommandSet>
   </Commands>
</Macro>>

At the moment the running of the macro’s
isn’t very nice. I plan on making a nice GUI, and shunting the actual running of the
macros to a service so you can configure a single computer to be the server and then
connect to it from any client (another windows PC, PocketPC or over the web). It will
give me a chance to play around with WCF (Indigo).

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