Project Updates for 9/12/2018

Monday, I received my other Light Switch and it installed very easily. After all the playing around with the X-10 devices, I decided to buy a CM15A off eBay or multiple reasons:

I got an AdaFruit Huzzah Feather because it can make use of a LiPo battery for reliability and wired up a couple harnesses, so the entire thing can be assembled without a breadboard. I should be getting a project box in a couple of days that I'll stick the circuitry into. I polished up the firmware and implemented the new commands so other people can put together a cheap and easy modern FireCracker controller if they happen to have a firecracker laying around or want to buy one to throw it together. However, even though everything says so online, the All Off Command just didn't seem to work. Everything else did. If you're interested, you can get the code from Github. I also wrote a fairly detailed Readme for how to get this up and running with OpenHAB.

It turns out the micro USB port on the Hackulator isn't working right, so I need to look into that, but it should be fairly simple as it's nothing more than a glorified micro usb extension cable. I will work on this soon. I spent all evening working on rewriting the firmware to be much nicer for public eyes, so I ran out of time to work on this tonight. Also, I started a project for this on Hackaday.io and uploaded a few pictures.

Tomorrow and the next day, I should be getting some stuff to build some OpenHAB friendly Smart Outlets to control even more devices. One of the limitation with the X10 devices is they are only designed for ungrounded devices, which can be a bit annoying. Also, I should be getting another smart dimmer switch identical to the last one I got and I plan to open it up and write some custom firmware so that it can work with OpenHAB and not some Chinese controlled server like they are now.

Posted in Old Posts 12 Sep 2018