Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

32

Part I: Home Automation

correctly, press the “House/On” button on one of your motion detectors.

You should see output that resembles the following:

Porch motion detected. Received: C9CJ.

Turning on: B1

Turning on: B3

Of course, the output will vary depending on the time of day. Also, now that

you’ve triggered the motion detector, the script thinks that it’s dusk because

you configured the motion detector to send signals only when it’s dark.

If things don’t work as expected, try moving your X10 computer interface and the

wireless transceiver to different electrical outlets. You could even try connecting

them to outlets right next to each other.

Take a look and see if the porch light turned on. If it did, congrats! Press

Ctrl+C

to stop the script running so you can schedule it to run automati-

cally in the background.

WARNING

Note that you can run only one such script at a time, because only one script can

control the serial port on your computer.

7. Schedule the script

For your script to run, your computer must be running. At some point,

however, you're going to need to turn off or at least reboot your system. You

don't want to have to restart the script each time the computer restarts, so

you should configure your script to run automatically at startup. To do this,

execute the following commands in a terminal window:

su

echo perl /usr/<username>/homehacks/x10-controls.pl >> ...