X10 Community Forum
🔌General Home Automation => Original ActiveHome => Topic started by: Bill Pleasants on January 24, 2008, 08:15:55 PM
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Hello.
I just got the HC60CRX interface, a WS467 type dimmer switch and downloaded ActiveHome to program a simulated sunrise. To be specific, I want to gradually increase the brightness from 0 to 100% over an hour or two with no noticeable sudden changes of level. I learned from other posts to set the level to 1% before bedtime and in the morning, increase the level from there. I decided for a first trial, it would be easy to increase the level 1% per minute. At the 5 minute point, I saw that I didn't really want to go through this sequence 95 more times. I looked at the MYHOUSE.X10 file with Notepad and saw ordinary text with square symbols. I thought it would be possible to edit this in short order to the final form. To check this, I saved the unedited Notepad data to MYHOUSE.X10. Then attempting to open this in ActiveHome, got "Not recognized."
So, my question is how can I edit the .X10 file and have it run? I would appreciate any help.
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Hello.
I just got the HC60CRX interface, a WS467 type dimmer switch and downloaded ActiveHome to program a simulated sunrise. To be specific, I want to gradually increase the brightness from 0 to 100% over an hour or two with no noticeable sudden changes of level. I learned from other posts to set the level to 1% before bedtime and in the morning, increase the level from there. I decided for a first trial, it would be easy to increase the level 1% per minute. At the 5 minute point, I saw that I didn't really want to go through this sequence 95 more times. I looked at the MYHOUSE.X10 file with Notepad and saw ordinary text with square symbols. I thought it would be possible to edit this in short order to the final form. To check this, I saved the unedited Notepad data to MYHOUSE.X10. Then attempting to open this in ActiveHome, got "Not recognized."
So, my question is how can I edit the .X10 file and have it run? I would appreciate any help.
That's a binary file with a few embedded ASCII strings. You won't be able to edit it with a text editor.
It'll take about 150 of the smallest brighten commands to fully brighten the light. You won't be able to load that many into the HC60CRX 1K EEPROM memory, if that was your intention. You could go to 6% brightens and I think that will fit.
I've never used it so can't give specific instructions, but there's a command line interface named X10COMM.EXE which is included with the ActiveHome 1.42 installation in c:\Program Files\Home Control. Also a help file X10COMM.HLP there. If you can get it working you could put the brighten commands in a batch file and have the Windows task launcher run it at the appropriate time each day.
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Thank you for the quick reply, Charles. I played around with the command line command. The DIM TO command doesn't seem to work but the DIM and BRIGHTEN change the level incrementally without starting at 100%. The delay is supposed to go to 999 minutes = 16.67 hours. So now I only need to learn how the task launcher works and I'm in business.
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Thank you for the quick reply, Charles. I played around with the command line command. The DIM TO command doesn't seem to work but the DIM and BRIGHTEN change the level incrementally without starting at 100%. The delay is supposed to go to 999 minutes = 16.67 hours. So now I only need to learn how the task launcher works and I'm in business.
You'll need only a 1 minute delay because you can put commands in a loop, e.g.,
for /L %%x in (1,1,10) do @echo %%x
[Added in edit]
BTW, I called it "Task Launcher" but should have said "Task Scheduler".