I bought a couple of X10-building blocks : a tranceiver, an appliance- and a lamp-module, a computer-interface and a motion detector and started playing using the Indigo help-page. All modules worked immediately and getting them under Indigo’s control was also no problem. Clearly it is fun to control a living room lamp and the coffee maker from your computer but it gets even better when you program actions. With Indigo you can let your home automation system react to incoming emails. For example, if it is a rainy workday and I want to have a cup of coffee when I bicycle home I can just send an email with subject “Make coffee”. Indigo checks at home my email every two-minutes and when it scans this subject-title it will send a signal to the coffee maker to turn on (assuming I filled it with water and coffee beforehand, otherwise it may result in a fire…). One can also program it the other direction. For example, with Indigo I can program things so that when the motion detector detects movement from opening the front door, I can ask to send an email to work (or to a mobile but as I am not using these things this is no option) with message “Someone just walked in…”.
Getting the motion-detector (MS13 for the experts) working was so far the second hardest thing to do. I couldnt work out how to give it a home&unit code but I found a readable manual page which made everything work. I have to remember to change the other default options of the detector.
The hardest thing to solve was to get the Indigo Web Interface working. Following the instructions on this page to the letter I thought that I could control my X10-stuff from any other computer (assuming Indigo is running on my iBook) by accessing the URL

http://iBookLieven.local/cgi-bin/Indigo.acgi

but all I got was a ‘Server Error’. I figured out that the mistake was caused by the acgi dispatcher program. The first time this is run, it asks for your admin password to write some extra lines to the httpd.conf Apache configuration file, but for some strange reason it didn’t want to accept my password… Changing permissions on httpd.conf and even creating a genuine root-account didn’t help so I was stuck for a while. But then I found the Mac OS X hack #91 which not only explains the use of the dispatcher tool but also explains what it adds to the httpd.conf-file. So, I just copied the following lines manually at the end of httpd.conf

#BEGIN acgi dispatcher Include
/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/dispatcher.app/Contents/acgi.conf\r\
nEND acgi dispatcher

did restart the Apache webserved by a

sudo apachectl graceful

after which the acgi dispatcher tool started up without problems and I got a working Indigo Web Interface. I must remember to put both Indigo and the dispatcher into my StartUp items.
The Web Interface is very basic compared to other house automation programs such as MisterHouse which makes up for its sexist name by being open source! It is entirely written in Perl but as I am only halfway through the Learning Perl book at the moment, this will have to wait a bit longer…

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Posted in mac
Written on Sat, 20 March 2004 at 9:47 pm
Tags: mac
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