Programming Your Home

What You Need

X10 is a company that has been selling its proprietary electrical switches for many years, and the technology has changed little since its introduction over thirty years ago. Yet regardless of its age, X10 power switches are still a primary home automation technology, mostly because they are inexpensive and, when coupled with a computer, can send and schedule power on/off events.

Instead of relying on X10’s rigid and proprietary Windows-based application to control X10 devices, we are going to use a freely available open source utility called Heyu. Created and maintained by Daniel Suthers and Charles Sullivan, Heyu provides a command-line interface to monitor and send a variety of X10 commands to the CM11A. These instructions ...