X10 RF devices?

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I got a 2413U, and it seems to work fine for controlling X10 appliance and lamp modules. There’s a 3-5 second delay in issuing the command.

However, is this supposed to recognize the RF remote commands? I have the X10 RF transceiver module plugged in. If I press A1 ON on the palmpad remote, A1 appliance module turns on. But Vera does not see the RF command. Should it?

2

wow 3-5 second delay? :o

i also own one of these devices but have no incorporated it, as im not sure i will require any x-10 devices afterall. i would like to know the answer though.

it would be great to have the x-10 palmpad be ‘heard’ by the vera and therefore know the state of the x-10 devices connected!

3

[quote=“Intrepid, post:1, topic:168884”]I got a 2413U, and it seems to work fine for controlling X10 appliance and lamp modules. There’s a 3-5 second delay in issuing the command.

However, is this supposed to recognize the RF remote commands? I have the X10 RF transceiver module plugged in. If I press A1 ON on the palmpad remote, A1 appliance module turns on. But Vera does not see the RF command. Should it?[/quote]The last I checked, (1.1.1183) Vera could only control X-10, not respond to it, although I did occasionally get an “undefined” device message in response to an X-10 device turning on or off, which proved X-10 data was going into Vera.

But the 2413U is PLC only, so Vera can’t see X-10 generated RF even if she wanted to.

JOD.

4
But the 2413U is PLC only, so Vera can't see X-10 generated RF even if she wanted to.

Right, but I have an RF transceiver module plugged in which receives RF and converts/sends to X10.

Still, the 2413U/vera does not seem to be able to ‘hear’ x10 signals, so this $90 experiment is being returned.

5

I might have some good news for you? Not entirely sure!

I have been working on a plugin will allows you to use a cm15a / cm19a for complete RF, PL, and RFSEC (the X10 RF devices that don’t use house codes like the ds10a door/window sensor). Basically, any X10 devices you can think off. I am leveraging the mochad linux daemon (mochad download | SourceForge.net).

I’ve been meaning to do this for months but finally got around to writing some code for it today. I just finished implementing binary lights and have been sitting here turning a lamp on and off with a dumb grin on my face for the past 10 minutes. I am planning on adding support for everything (motion sensors up and probably even their camera mounts) because it is already in mochad and the heavy lifting was done for me.

If you are interested in doing this you can either run mochad on your linux computer, or, do what I did and buy a cheap plug computer. You can also run it on openwrt (I had it running on an Asus wl500gpv2 router as well). Technically you could get mochad running on the vera but I didn’t want to mess with that. I would recommend this:

  1. Pogoplug Pink v2 ($35-40)
  2. Certified Link New cm15a ($20 from x10, I got another one about a week ago /w 20% and free shipping = $16).

That is maybe $60 for access to all x10 devices. The big caveat is I haven’t implemented it all yet! I will be though, and I’m certainly happy to help out with setting up mochad or a plug computer.

6

Very interesting. It would make for a cheap low-power way to keep using some of the x10 sensors. The x10 door sensors, motion sensors, and remotes are dirt cheap and work pretty well. If I could just simply use the x10 sensors to trigger some Vera scenes, it would be very handy.

I notice you mentioned pogo pink v2. Why that specific one?

edit: went ahead and ordered a pogoplug pink from buy.com for $40. I already have the cm19a. This should be fun to play with.

7

I have a black pogoplug pro… Rather useless ATM because networkspeeds on wifi are dramatic (low… Even on draft N)

would that also be usable?!?

Henk

8

would this work with a cm17a? its a serial based ‘firecracker’ module

9

[quote=“Intrepid, post:6, topic:168884”]I notice you mentioned pogo pink v2. Why that specific one?

edit: went ahead and ordered a pogoplug pink from buy.com for $40. I already have the cm19a. This should be fun to play with.[/quote]

I suppose you figured out why the pink one. I think I am getting sucked in, but I it looks like my older CM11a interface wouldn’t be supported. I guess it would be cheap enough to get the latest one from X10. I think I’m gonna grab a pogo plug either way.

10

I didn’t actually figure out why the pink v2, but all the cool hacking activity seems to center around that one. And radar recommended it.

The pogo only has USB, not serial. Isn’t the cm15a serial? I purchased the cm19 not too long ago and it is definitely USB and, I think, x10 rf aware.

11

@Intrepid The pink one is the cheapest :wink:

@radarengineer do you know if once you convert the pogoplug into a Linux server, and then add the X10 fuctionality, if it can still be used for its original purpose (albiet without the pogoplug software I assume) of accessing drives remotely? Could it still work with drives on the other USB ports? Can you use the Popgplug software a with the mochad daemon running in the background?

Also can anyone else tell what the Pogo Premium software $29 really gets you, it seems to just add streaming to remote PCs/phones?

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Radarengineer,

I assume Vera will be able to hear X10 triggers? It is not only one way control, but also react/monitor?

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Wow! All sorts of questions. I’ll see if I can answer everyone.

@Intrepid: The Pogo Pink v2 is good mostly because it is the cheapest. The older v2 devices are also nice because you can use a standard linux kernel. The cm15a is USB. The cm19a is basically the same without a power line interface. Mochad can hear x10 triggers and x10 security triggers. It should have full support of x10 devices. I don’t have it all implemented yet. I will be working on it tonight though and I will post what I have. It should all be pretty straightforward.

@Henk: You can put Archlinux ARM (http://archlinuxarm.org/) on the Pogoplug Pro. I’m pretty sure it should work fine.

@Hightop32: The cm17a will not work with the mochad software. You could probably do something similar, but honestly I wouldn’t bother. I believe the cm17a is transmit only. You can get a cm19a /w a refurb Lamp Module (LM465SD) and a TM751 Wireless Transceiver from X10 for $9.99. I normally order during the during the 20% off sale with free shipping which makes it even cheaper. A refurb cm15a is $19.99. That gives you powerline control as well.

@shady: You can’t run the pogoplug software at the same time as mochad. You typically boot linux from a usb thunb drive or hard drive and if you remove it the original software is booted, so you don’t lose it. However, you can certainly use it as a server. You can access files remotely with samba. My pogoplug is also running a webserver that is hosting a webcam. I believe the pogo premium service allows you to stream mp3s and videos where without it you only get file and photo access. I have never tried it myself.

EDIT: Now I have binary and dimmable lights working :slight_smile:

It looks like the cm19a doesn’t support all of the same commands as the cm15a. I think the event receiving capability is the same, but you can’t dim to a specific level, you can just issue “dim” and “bright” commands over the rf interface. I would strongly recommend spending the $20 ($16 on sale!) for a refurb cm15a if you want to use lamp modules and set a specific dim percentage. I have two “certified like new” cm15a controllers and they both work great. I have a few cm19a so I’ll try to make sure they work too, but I’m not sure how to handle the dimmable lights for the cm19a yet.

See here for more info:

14

@shady & @radarengineer,

theres a pogoplug plugin for Windows, Linux and i think Apple.
This lets you acces the pogoplug attached drives as of they were local.

The newest version of this plugin allows the harddisk of the client it runs on to be accesed from the
pogoplug webportal (with limited capabilities)

The premium service add full capabilities to the desktopstreaming etc.
It does nothing for the functionality of the pogoplug itself.

@radarengineer, ill look into that link, thanks

Henk

15

The usb hard drive I had attached to my pogoplug died! It was a 10 year old IDE hard drive (refurbished to boot) that has been shipping around the country a few times so I suppose it was about time. :slight_smile: I had to revert to my linux server to run mochad for now.

I’ll be setting mine pogoplug again from scratch with ArchLinuxArm sometime soon so I’ll try to take good notes.

I also spent some time working on my plugin. I now have binary lights, dimmable lights, soft-start dimmable lights (most new x10 dimmers, you have to handle these differently as they use “extended dim”), and motion sensors more or less working. I am having a problem figuring out the child id device from its alt id so I have my motion sensor ids hard coded right now, but I’ll probably get that going soon.

I still have to tackle X10RFSEC devices and then how to handle dimming to a set level with a cm19a. I’m pretty sure you can do this, I might just have to send multiple dim/bright signals in a row. I’ll see how ActiveHome handles this.

Once I get things cleaned up a little bit more I’ll post everything in a thread on the plugins sections and hopefully get some feedback and how to make the code prettier. :slight_smile:

16

I started a new thread with attached code in the plugins subforum:

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=7463.0

It is not really ready for prime time yet, but hopefully other people can chime in with ideas!

EDIT: I added a brief guide to installing mochad on that thread:

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=7463.msg47969#msg47969

17

I got the pogoplug pink setup with mochad (thanks to radarengineer). It works well, but as radar mentioned, the CM19a antenna is poor. I did this: [url=http://www.shed.com/tutor/mr26ant.html]http://www.shed.com/tutor/mr26ant.html[/url] to extend the range significantly.

So far, powerline X10 control works perfectly with my old, standard one-way modules. But what I really want this for is the RF stuff, to monitor for changes and ultimately run vera scripts. The DS10A door sensor works perfectly. The MS12A motion sensor works perfectly. The palmpad remote works perfectly.

The only device I’ve tried that doesn’t seem to work is the DS12A, which is a small RFSEC door sensor, similar to the DS10A, but smaller. For some reason all I get is:

12/31 18:33:16 Rx RFSEC Addr: 6C:34:80 Func: (null)
12/31 18:33:16 Invalid parity

18

@Intrepid, do you have a lot of those ds12a sensors? It seem like the RF codes they transmit are slightly different. The ds10a supports sending a tamper signal but not a low battery. Once the plugin is stable maybe we could try to figure out why the decoding is failing in mochad.

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No, I think I’ve only got a couple. Oddly, this one was still installed on my garage entry door (I’d forgotten about it), and I discovered it was still active when playing with mochad. Mostly i have ds10as. No biggie.

20

CM17a is transmit only. Not only that, but it transmits by toggling RTS and DTR to send data to X10, bit by bit with specific timing. Not good for multi-tasking environments, and may not work reliably through a USB/Serial converter.