[LHA-misc] beginner questions

[Daniel <ea...@li...>]

Greetings, all.

I know this is a Linux HA group and not a general X10 group, but I'm
having trouble finding beginner's info on X10.  Finally today I ordered
an ActiveHome starter kit (the free Hawkeye deal sounded kinda cool). :)

Well, I have some questions on the CM11a and its two-way functionality.
Mostly I am interested in learning how two-way X10 works and how you do
it with a CM11a.  Unfortunately I haven't found that info online.
Perhaps I just haven't searched everywhere yet, but alas... :(  Does a
CM11a receive _all_ X10 signals and just send them via serial port to
the PC?  If so, that's exactly what I need.

Does anyone have any pointers for that info?  I mean, what I'm
interested in doing is having sensors send signals to the PC via the
CM11a and have some program logic *do something* with that info.  For
example, say a motion sensor detects motion outside my house.  I don't
just want a light to come on inside - I want my house to *know* whether
I'm at work (internal motion sensors coupled with time-of-day and
day-of-week logic) and alpha-page me if someone breaks into my house.
Then I want microphones to start recording sounds inside the house,
saving the data to the PC's hard drive via the sound card.  (These are
just hypothetical examples, but I'm sure they could be done with X10.)

I'm hoping that the CM11a is just the start of a long and exciting
hobby.

Thanx for the help, guys!

Daniel

PS - can't wait to get my new toys and get up & running with Linux HA! :)

PPS - obligatory Linux-HA questions.  I downloaded and compiled x10d
today but it doesn't do anything.  I did notice in syslog that it
complains of "x10d[11325]: hamx10: unknown service"... so I searched the
source and found a getservbyname() call looking for service "hamx10."
I've looked on danlan.com but don't find any reference to that service.
Anyone got any tips on getting it to work?
-- 
Eagle