From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-10-26T10:40:05+09:00
Subject: Re: x10 and ruby?

Hal Fulton wrote:

/ ...

> What's much more realistic is to get Ruby scripting working
> with HomeSeer (www.homeseer.com) one way or another.
> That's my current dream.

Umm, I just looked into this, and HomeSeer is simply an application that
talks to whatever home controller you already have. If you have a CM11A or
1132U for X-10, HomeSeer knows how to talk to it. So from a Ruby
perspective, we might as well simply write a home controller in pure Ruby
that talks to the X-10 controllers.

What I mean is HomeSeer isn't necessary -- if we intend to write a Ruby
controller to talk to X-10 interfaces, we might as well do that directly.

Also, a bit off our topic, it appears that HomeSeer is a Windows program.
Not much use to me, assuming I wanted to go that route.

I have a very basic PC-based home controller that turns my lights on and off
quasi-randomly when I am on the road (also I can dial into my house
remotely and control the house using my installed X-10 stuff, plus I can
look at some TV camera outputs, sort of check up on things). I could easily
have created something much more ambitious if I had felt the need, but I
lost interest once I realize how annoyingly unreliable and tricky the X-10
stuff is.

I think it wold be very easy to create an X-10 based home controller using
Ruby and a GUI front end (I mean, if I were not so lazy). I think it would
end up looking much like HomeSeer.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com