LGR Oddware - X10: MS-DOS Smart Home Automation

[Homer J Simpson]

[timb]

Heh, I still use X10 to control (admittedly fewer and fewer) incandescent bulbs around my house. I use a CM11A Serial to X10 interface, hooked to a  Raspberry Pi as the controller.

On the software side, the Pi runs Heyu, which handles the actual X10 stuff. It also runs some neat software called Homebridge, which allows you to access older and non-HomeKit compatible gear through Apple’s HomeKit interface. (In my case, I use it to bridge X10, Wemo and Hue together.)

So now I can control 30+ year old home automation technology directly with my iPhone. (“Hey Siri, set the living room lamp to 20%.”) I can also control Wemo Outlets and Hue Bulbs right along side them. It’s pretty slick.

X10 is like the cockroach of the home automation world. I don’t think it’ll ever really die. Lamp dimmer and appliance modules are cheap and plentiful, plus they’re fairly robust. Someone should really come up with a modern WiFi to X10 Transmitter that you can just plug in and is Google Home and Apple HomeKit compatible out of the box, to service all the old modules floating around.

[Ampera]

Or better yet, take advantage of the fact that X10 DOESN'T need Google home and live your life without an audio bug in your house listening to whatever you say.

[rrinker]

 I still have some X10 stuff floating around. I used to have nearly the whole house hooked up with it, a couple of houses ago. Already Windows PCs so I used a program called HomeSEER to drive it all. Part of it was convenience - the back yard floodlights were controlled by a switch in the upstairs bedroom, not a switch by the actual back door of the house. So that one got replaced with an X10 switch and one of their stickey keypad RF remote switches stuck next to the back door.

Dimming of the actual X10 light controllers is pretty poor - and they always come up at full then dim down, but they were practically giving that stuff away. Some of my uses for low wattage candle type lamps caused the lamp modules to not work so I actually had to use the relay appliance modules.

I totally agree on the way new things work. It makes absolutely no sense to me that each devices needs to connect to an external web site to be controlled. There is zero benefit for an individual light bulb or door sensor or thermostat to connect directly to the internet. It's just a silly unnecessary thing even if you do ignore the security issue. If you MUST control from anywhere int he world, there's no reason the in-home devices can;t just talk to a  central hub which would be the ONLY device exposed to the internet. Much easier to secure one more capable device than hundreds of tiny ones. In fact, this is the way X10 worked with HomeSEER - they had a web server in there you could use if you wanted to allow access remotely. I briefly set it up and allowed access to just the lamp in my office, and pointed my web cam at it, shared the link with a few friends and they had fun for all of 5 minutes making my light go on and off.