Home automation and X10 control in Gentoo

[Flandry]

Well, i've finally licked one of the last three big obstacles preventing me from bailing out of my worm and malware-ridden W2K installation. I got my CM11a (from automatedliving.com, originally part of the rather unstable HALdeluxe package) X10 interface working in Linux.

Because i had such a hard time and found relatively few posts and previous experiences, i thought i'd summarize my experience for anyone else trying to move an automated home (or dorm room) to Linux control.

The first X10 package i tried was wish), which makes X10 modules appear as devices in /dev and allows for control of each directly through scripts and the commandline. Wish is comprised of a kernel module (it patches your kernel source) and a user-level component.

I'm not sure still if my troubles with wish were because of Gentoo's unique way of arranging system files and such, or more because of my own inexperience, but in spite of many emails to (and several version updates from) the project manager, i couldn't get the module to be made without hacking some files in linux/drivers/, and then there were other problems.

Next i tried a java program i found on sourceforge. Unfortunately this required a couple comm libraries (rxfx?) to be installed that were a bit confusing and the ftp server for one was down at the time i tried. Because i am leaving on vacation and must have my plant and aquarium lighting reliably controlled while i'm away, and my HAL installation on W2K has become too unstable (crashes the system < 24 hrs), there was no time to waste fiddling around with getting "write once, run anywhere" java working.

So last i tried the program i had been avoiding because it was a bit more than i thought i wanted or needed- Mister House. This is like using a BFG to kill a grunt, if you know what i mean.

But... it works. Installation was relatively painless, even though there isn't an ebuild. No kernel patching and module building, no esoteric drivers. Just changed the ini file and config file to represent my X10 interface and modules and started up the program.

In fact, assuming i can figure it out sufficiently, i don't see any reason not to adopt it as a favorable alternative to the rather expensive HAL products. Being able to run it as a service is definitely a bonus.

Anyway, that's my little story. Hopefully it is helpful to someone in the future. I will update this as i have time to explore misterhouse more.

[mallchin]

I found a simple app called heyu that did the job perfectly, although this seems to have broken on my new amd64 box.

I think I'll investigate some of your suggestions

[eversonl]

Hi guys, I am tryijng to get a gentoo / mister house setup together.
Brand spanking new to linux so it's a steep learning curve for me.

Any tips or suggestions for a clean install minimal setup for a misterhouse installation?

[Flandry]

This is a bit late, but i can give you an update of my experiences with Misterhouse.

I installed my workstation, so i wasn't going for minimal. Eventually this system will become the house server, but not just yet.

Misterhouse has been great. I have gotten into it enough to get through some of the confusing parts of the documentation, and learned how to install new perl modules (which is essential to add new components to the base mh install). I have it grabbing four or five of my favorite comics each day, showing me the weather, controlling timed lights, waking me up, and a few other things. I will be expanding its services to include monitoring a 1-wire network of temperature probes to help simplify the maintenance of my plants, and a few other things.

Try it. You'll like it.

[Colonel Paneek]

There is a preliminary ebuild for heyu filed as bug 91396