RWVHP

While looking for the holy grail in home automation protocols, I made a little discovery, a bit of kit called a Connect ME made by Digi. What this bit of hardware does is give you an over-sized RJ45 plug (or wireless antenna) and built into it is an embedded OS with development kit, now your probably asking “And?”, well here’s the thing in home automation, most of it can be interfaced via serial/RS-232, which is one of the things the Connect ME has connectivity for (as well as GPOs), so that “Service Port” on the back of your TV/AV Amp may just have another use, X10 / DMX / 1-Wire are some of other protocols made accessible.

So what do you do once you’ve hacked up all of the hardware needed to control everything? Start writing the software to interface with it should be a good start, now you don’t really wanna mess this up as your going to be doing it for lots of different devices, but all with the same hardware constraints, so no nice flashy web interface for this little device, course there is, make the web front-end a back-end, make it a web service and provide an interface that uses it, across all of your home automation devices. Hook the devices up with Zeroconf and they can be auto-detected by your interface, plug and play automation, once you build it and code it.

Now I know you could setup something like this using SNMP but come on where’s the fun in that?

So I guess the title of this should have been “Serial has gone 2.0”?

Installing Sphinx on Joyent is relatively straight forward, I use PostgreSQL over MySQL so some bits may not be relevant.

$ wget http://www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8-svn-r1112.tar.gz
$ tar xfvz sphinx-0.9.8-svn-r1112.tar.gz
$ cd sphinx-0.9.8-svn-r1112
$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/xpg4/bin
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/csw --without-mysql --with-pgsql && make && sudo make install

One on of our older machines accelerators we needed to adjust the ld paths a little for the PostgreSQL support, meaning the following

$ sudo crle  -l /lib:/usr/lib:/opt/csw/lib:/opt/csw/postgresql/lib

$ crle
Configuration file [version 4]: /var/ld/ld.config  
  Platform:     32-bit LSB 80386
  Default Library Path (ELF):   /lib:/usr/lib:/opt/csw/lib:/opt/csw/postgresql/lib
  Trusted Directories (ELF):    /lib/secure:/usr/lib/secure  (system default)

$ crle
Configuration file [version 4]: /var/ld/ld.config  
  Platform:     32-bit LSB 80386
  Default Library Path (ELF):   /lib:/usr/lib:/opt/csw/lib
  Trusted Directories (ELF):    /lib/secure:/usr/lib/secure  (system default)

And you’ll now find sphinx installed in /opt/csw/bin

Comments welcome, Enjoy.

Last night a friend and I wall mounted my TV it was simple, put bracket onto wall, put other half of bracket onto TV, lift it up to the wall and put the two bits back together, oh and take the normal stand off… that was the pain right there, 4 screws, four evil little screws that wouldn’t budge even tho unscrewed, as if held in with magic, we tried magnetic screwdrivers and even turning the TV horizontal and shaking it, not an easy job with a TV that weighs more then a large dog and is over a meter wide.

Got there in the end tho (took about one and half hours).

I’m enjoying the NAS + XBOX360 with HD-DVD drive + TV setup, now if only the NAS + XBOX supported controllers then I could use my phone to change video.

Now what to do for the cables running down the wall.

The Mephisto team has recently released 0.8 on the way to one point-oh adding

• Switched to will_paginate.
• Switched from acts_as_attachment to attachment_fu
• Custom routes
• Typo and Wordpress converters updates.
• XML-RPC interface moved out into a plugin.
• Multi-site admin interface (shameless plug as I wrote the initial patch).

Along with more, checkout the change log from git

git clone git://activereload.net/mephisto.git mephisto
cd mephisto; less CHANGELOG

Happy Blogging.