I\’ve barely managed to implement the six great tips for homemade dot mac servers by Alan Graham or he is already off on a new project : Home Automation with Mac OS X. I thought that home automation only could be installed in new, highly wired, houses but I was wrong. In part 1 Alan Graham gives an overview why you might consider home automation, gives the set-up in his house and outlines the hardware necessary to do it. Clearly, most of his hardware is American but even in Belgium it is not difficult to find vendors, for example intellihome.be. One can either control the X10-machinery by remote control or via computer. For Macintosh Alan Graham suggests to use the indigo program, of which one can download a fully functional version for a 30 day tryout. The only piece I could not find (yet) in Belgium was the PowerLink USB device but there is a serial-port alternative available which seems to work just fine using a USB to Serial cable (which are fairly expensive). In part 2 Alan Graham explains the basics of X10 technology and how you can install all the hardware. In part 3 and later he promises to explain the software part of things (if he hasnt started a new project by then…).

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Posted in mac
Written on Fri, 19 March 2004 at 9:43 pm
Tags: mac
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