Centauri's Thoughts

The use of motion detectors for turning on specific lights in the house has been a resounding success.

Part of the reason for this success has been clearly thinking out where these motion detectors are placed, and when they are to be triggered. The motion detectors have a setting for a) detecting ALL motion (day or night) or b) only make detection changes at night. The difference here is one acts like a motion activated night light, and the other is a 24x7 sentry of movement.

Next to be acquired is the in-line screw-in bulb X10 module. This will be most useful for a) porchlights and b) a single bulb in a lamp tree of three.

Also on the way is a doorbell sounding chime activated on a specific code.

I'll be writing about the heyu program for unix to communicate with the CM11 module in a separate post.

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Preparations are always good, even if in retrospect, they appear as overkill. Better safe than sorry.

We tested the generator, got some gas for it, topped off the cars, checked for candles, (and glowsticks), made sure we had canned foods and clean water.

We were expecting up to hurricane force winds, and given the proximity of peoples trees to the powerlines in our particular neighborhood, we figured some type of power outage would be a given.

Staying up all night was to be a useless endeavor, as our area was to be more affected today, not last night.

The strong winds and rain never really materialized here, nor did we lose power, but we were ready, in the event that it did happen.

I finally dug out the old X-10 stuff, and while thinking about how use of all that, and whether to use wine with the original CD, or look for linux drivers, I decided I would really rather run in native linux mode, and be able to study the source and underlying protocol. With that, I could write much more into control scripts.

One interesting ability is to get broadcasts from a device, re-direct that to the unix level, and fire scripts because of it. Thus: a motion sensor could trigger a series of events including turning on lights, sending an e-mail (with details of what triggered the e-mail), and other actions.

So far, the BEST uses have been simple, motion activated lighting in areas at night that ALWAYS need them on a temporary basis.

I'll find other uses, I'm sure.

I finally edited EVERY blog entry here for the Tag Cloud. Only took a couple of hours (sheesh).
I can still see where some further splitting of some items might be necessary.
Just one more thing to keep up on when blogging, I suppose.