Linux Home Automation

Using a simple $30 kit from x10.com, a bluetooth dongle and a bluetooth capable cell phone, one can easily setup some slick home automation.

A small application called bluemon allows for your linux machine to watch for bluetooth devices and run commands upon a quality of single you specify. The X10 kit I purchased came with a serial transmitter. This allows me to use bluemon to call bottlerocket, kicking on my lights when I enter a room.

Here is my config file for bluemon ( only changes shown ):

BLUEMON_ENABLE=’yes’
BLUETOOTHID=’aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff’
DISCONNECTHACK=-d

Once you have bluemon running, simply run the “bluemon-client” command. I use something like this:

bluemon-client -b aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff -u on -d off

off / on are simply shell scripts ( in $PATH ) that look kinda like this:

br -x /dev/ttyS0 -N
br -x /dev/ttyS0 -F

Good Times.

Thursday, October 4th, 2007 Automation, Debian, Unix

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