I have received several emails from people recently concerning my X10 software which I wrote about earlier in the year on automatedhome. Firstly thank you for your interest and offers of support, if I get a chance I will reply privately. However to be perfectly honest my own X10 software hasn't progressed much since my last posting on automatedhome.
Now I could make the usual hobbiest "project delayed" type excuses about a busy professional work life, helping my girlfriend gain employment after finishing her university degree, helping to run hamfest 2004 on the day, picking my girlfriend up from the airport, changing car, holiday abroad, several big family occasions, starting preparations to move home etc - however I won't! :-)
I guess you could say my X10 work has now become one of those "when it's ready" type of projects - that is to say I am still working on it, have many new ideas in my mind but haven't yet put pen to paper. I would very much like to develop it beyond packet monitoring and using the X10 protocol to send text messages over the mains between different PC's within my home - something NOT to be encouraged without a carefully written protocol - I added this feature for a bit of fun to help me test my X10 software. Yes before anyone emails me to ask "Hello World!" was one of my first X10 "messages".
A few weeks ago, I gave a home automation talk at Flight Refueling Amateur Radio Society aka FRARS and attempted to demostrate my X10 software as part of my talk. Now I can and have written/supported reliable systems which deal with $$$$ of data but the first time I'm publically demostrating a piece of my own software under development and well.... to be perfectly honest it failed to work correctly on the PC I wanted to use to demostrate X10 packet analysis.
Quite simply due to time constraints it hadn't been developed enough, still this failure has annoyed me enough that I will probably get back to it soon to fix it.
To make matters worse - a few months ago I brought a VGA2TV box to make PC captures easier! So I duly took my VGA2TV box along with me for the talk only to discover just after we set it up on the FRARS TV that the clubs TV would only show my PC screen in black and white even after dip switch tweaking - GRRRR! So during our last FRARS committee meeting last weekend I proposed and won support from the rest of the committee for the purchase of a VGA2TV box to help resolve this issue for future FRARS presentations - yesterday I brought a VGA2TV box for the FRARS which should be fully installed for Paul's G7EYT wireless LAN talk in a few weeks time.
I was pleased however that despite the issues I have written about, my talk (which covered publically available information) was well received with some positive feedback and requests for more information.
I will therefore be shortly writing a "top level" article on home automation for FRARS and then hope to get back to developing my own X10 software in the not to distant future - home moving (no fixed date - yet!) and other things permitting.
