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[mahuntington]

Hey everybody. I developed a home automation technique that allows you to control your appliances with your phone and Google calendar. Check it out:

http://www.matthewhuntington.com/home_automation/

also, I wrote a condensed version of the same article for R/GA:

http://techblog.rga.com/the-home-automation-of-tomorrow-today

[Noam]

Brilliant idea!
You should add in support for the three other controllers:
CM11A (serial port, PLC only)
CM15A (USB - PLC/RF)
CM19A (USB, RF only)

Then you should write a Windows version.

[dave w]

I'll second that. Motion is passed.

The X10 Firecracker is sort of a Rube Goldberg device, and is out there only because X10 gave hundreds of them away to promote module sales.

[Noam]

I'll second that. Motion is passed.

The X10 Firecracker is sort of a Rube Goldberg device, and is out there only because X10 gave hundreds of them away to promote module sales.

Well, technically, they used the "Firecracker" name for the CM19A, too.
I'll admit, the first X10 stuff I bought were the original serial-port "firecracker" kits. They had a one-per-customer $10 deal. I bought one, my dad bought one (which he gave to me), I bought one and had it shipped to my at work, I had a few friends in college who bought them, but weren't nerdy enough, so they gave the stuff to me, etc.

A few months ago I sold all my serial port firecracker transmitters (or all the ones I found, at least) to another user who was working on a development project. I hadn't used them in at least 10 years, and they were just sitting in my box of X10 parts.

I really love this idea of using the Google Calendar to schedule X10 timers. It is available from just about everywhere, it seems to work pretty well, and you can look up the upcoming events at a quick glance.
Add in reminders, and you can have notifications of when things should be happening, too!

Of course, it is only one-way at this point.
With a CM11a or (better yet) a CM15A, it would be incredible to monitor the signals, and PUSH events back to the Google calendar! You would then have a time-based activity monitor - How cool would that be??!!!