A collection of Remote Control Daemons


RcDaemon (the latest & greatest) is a collection of Unix programs that use inexpensive hardware to control lights, appliances, video/audio equipment, etc. There are currently 4 control daemons, x10d, mld, hcs2d, and ird.

RcDaemon (for 2.2.1)

The x10d daemon is used to control and monitor X-10 based equipment. The primary hardware components used are X-10 PowerHouse controller/modules (aka. Radio Shack Plug 'n Power).

The ird daemon allows users to control infrared devices such as stereo and tv equipment. There is support for several different infrared controllers.

The mld daemon allows temperature monitoring of a building or piece of equipment such as a computer.

The hcs2d daemon connects rcdaemon services to the Circuit Cellar Inc. (tm) HCS2D Supervisory Controller.


Misc. code pieces used by the above packages:

The Lcd2 code used by xmltherm and other control apps.

The Xc widget package used by control apps.

The Xfwf package can be found in the ports collection: /usr/ports/x11/FWF


Daemons communicate with clients, as well as other daemons thru Unix Domain Sockets. A planned extension will use TCP Sockets, allowing daemons to be spread across a network. Each daemon knows only about the hardware it controls. If a daemon wants to control a device handled by another daemon it sends a message to the controlling daemon.

Future daemons will include the ability to handle voice input.

You can take a look at the (primitive) setup documentation. There is also an in-progress html documentation page.


You can reach me: smp@csn.net

X-10 and PowerHouse are trademarks of X-10 (USA) Inc.

PLIX is a trademark of Micromint, Inc.

Radio Shack and Plug 'n Power are trademarks of Tandy Corp.