Tuesday, July 04, 2006

HA controllers ruin my day.

Well I'm back to work on my device drivers and software for Misterhouse. I've updated the drivers to support Linux 2.6.15 or better. They're not posted yet as I have a packaging problem (I need to support 2.4, 2.6 less then .15 and 2.6 greater than/equal to .15). There were a few changes to the handling of module parameters that needed to be corrected. I've also spent a little time working on the cm15d software. I can now correctly set the clock and send simple X10 commands. I hope to have it correctly receive simple X10 commands also then it should be ready to use with the NSLU2 I have.

My serial Insteon PLC is still messed up. I know what happened, I sent commands to it too fast (it can only handle 3 bytes at a time). I'll work on my code and figure out how to rewrite the core app (that's very important). Then I'll get back to writing my MH code. In the mean time I'll be using the USB PLC with MH to keep going. This is very annoying. Also Bob Paauwe has updated his ilinks to v 0.02. I have had a chance to look at it but I hope to some time this week.

And now for a little rant! I was poking around and found out that X10 has update their forums (that's good). Imagine my surprise when I found a forum for "Linux & Open Source and the X10 Home" (sorry I'm not going to provide a link to it). Wow great finally we're going to get some support! Well no we're not! To this day X10 has not shared the CM15A's communication protocol with the community (it's been about 10 months). So even though I am working on the CM15A software (because I bought one on the promise of the documentation) I'm not going to post any relevant information to the X10 forum. If X10 can't support us (the Open Source community) then why should we support them. Vote with your cash, purchase Insteon, UPB or Z-Wave (there's an Open Source driver in the kernel). Anything but X10!