X10 Home Control Package

So what's included? The product I'm offering is my PHP script which has been custom designed for proper display on the iPhone and a good bit of integration scripting to save you some installation hassle. I've put a lot of work into it and priced it low. I've deliberately made it easy to modify so that you can customize the lamp/appliance icons and titles to suit. If you are the geeky type that already has your own home web server and wireless network, you wont' need much more than this and a CM11 or CM17 serial X10 controller. You can get those at www.x10.com but be sure and Google CM11A and/or check out eBay. I've seen the CM11 for well under ten dollars on eBay from reputable dealers.

But for the rest of you that might need it all, I've prepared a bootable CD image that will allow you to take your selected PC hardware and with just a few affirmations do a complete install of a Fedora Linux web server, PHP, Heyu and my script. It will also configure the necessary startup tasks and assign an IP address on your network. Please understand that I'm NOT selling either Fedora, Heyu or PHP. These are all freely available to you for download on the web. All I've done is package them more conveniently for this application and provided the necessary integration. Ultimately my PHP script is what you are buying but the rest is provided as a value added service for your convenience. I've also trimmed down the Linux install to CD size instead of the normal 3GB plus DVD isntall.

Please note that HEYU is included on the CD image as a convenience for you and with permission from the authors. The "tar ball" is unmodified from their distribution and they ask that in consideration for this convenience that if you have any issues with this operating in conjunction with this package that you direct your questions to me as they really can't answer questions about its function in my application scenario. By being able to thus "bundle" it, I can automate some of the installation that you otherwise would need to do if the package was downloaded separately. They've been most kind and I don't want them burdened with support requests from my product either.

I've rented space on a high bandwidth server so that you can download the .iso image for the CD in about 20 minutes instead of the FOUR HOURS it would take to get it directly from my "home" server. So part of the nominal charge goes to support this server. I'm not locking this up with passwords, keys and the like which only get in the way of both of us having fun. But I'd ask that you respect that open approach and not share the download link with others that haven't paid as you have. Ultimately if this doesn't support itself I'll have to give up the server rental and I've priced this much lower than it's worth just to encourage proper sales

By the way, if you have some other command line X10 package (there are a lot of them out there) that you prefer, my iPhone PHP script can be easily modified by you to execute those commands instead of HEYU commands. I will be glad to advise (if you really need it) but my favorite is HEYU. My "wall to wall" integrated install had to pick one and HEYU is the one I know best.

Installation: (see photo gallery)

So lets start with the complete install and work our way down from there. Go to the download link you received when you made your Paypal payment. If you missed that, or the Paypal redirect bombed just email me:

d o n [a t] b a b c o c k . o r g

and I'll send it to you. Download the .iso CD image and burn it to a CD using your favorite burner software. If you don't have any, you might want to try DeepBurner . It's free and works very well.

Next get an old PC that you can use for your web server. Basically almost any old PC should do. Later on I'll tell you about a small single board computer that I'm using if you don't have one but basically you just need a low end Pentium box with at least 256MB of RAM. Any hard drive over 2 GB should do fine. Actually, at the present time the image is a shade over 1 GB as installed and I've ordered a small 2GB solid state drive to play with but haven't received it yet.

I'm currently using an old 40GB (it was the smallest I had that was still reliable.) The PC needs at least one serial port. That's usually the 9-Pin "D" connector typically next to the 15 Pin SVGA port on mother boards with built in video. You'll need ONE ethernet port to tie into your existing wireless network or a wireless router you purchase for this project. You can buy an 10/100 ethernet card from places like Intrex for under ten bucks if your candiate PC doesn't have a port built into the motherboard. Most office supply stores these days also sell them but usually not quite that low in price. Most PC's less than 10 years old probably do. Finally the PC should have a CD or DVD ROM drive to read the CD. Once you've installed the software and set up the server the CD is no longer needed so you can "borrow" one temporarily if you need to.

Put the CD you burned in the drive of the target PC and reboot it. You might need to adjust the bios settings to have the first boot device be from CD/DVD in order to boot from the CD. I've minimized the number of prompts to the bare minimum required.

On boot you'll see a boot menu with two "kickstart" options, one for Linksys based networks (keyboard shortcut "L") and the other for DLink (keyboard shortcut "D"). The only difference in the installs is the address I use to configure the web server. With the Linksys boxes it is 192.168.1.151. With the DLink install you get 192.168.0.151 which fits in respectively with the default network addresses for those devices. Of course once you've installed the server you can set any addressing you like but I had to start somewhere and the goal was as much as possible a "hands off" install.

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