X-10 Remote Control


Several levels of 'mapping' files allow the user to assign logical names to physical X-10 house/unit codes, as well as execute macro commands. For example, pressing button 3-ON might expand to turning on the stereo, connecting it's audio/video input to the VCR, it's video output to the television, turn on the television, etc. Among other things, a macro can run a program via the Unix system() call, so the possibilities are more or less unlimited.

The daemons consist of the client interface daemon and a reader/writer child pair that interface to the hardware. Clients open a socket to x10d for processing of their requests. The current scheme is limited to the use of Unix Domain sockets. If a picture would help to understand this, here's one in postscript.

Among the existing clients for the rcDaemon package are xx10mini (shown at top of this page) & xx10maxi (in development). These are based upon the Free Widget Foundation widget set. Also available are Motif based versions of the same controllers.

The current version uses either the FreeBSD X-10 driver, /dev/tw, or a serial-port based X-10 interface, the Serplix.

The FreeBSD tw device driver is a TW523/parallel port based driver.

The SerPlix box can send/receive all possible X-10 codes thru the 117 volt house wiring. It uses an ASIC chip sold by Micromint ( PLIX ) and the PowerHouse TW523 X-10 powerline interface module. The schematic for the SerPlix is available as a dump in HP laserjet format in this file.

It should be fairly simple to port the reader/writer daemons to use other commercially available X-10 computer-based controllers.


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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.