Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group

Algonquin College Rideau Campus, Room A130
Thursday, 2001 Oct 4, 19:00 hours

and this will be one exciting show.  So bring your friends along.

Title: "Hey, You!  Turn that light Off!"
                    - or -
       Using Linux to control Home Automation (X10) Devices

Speaker: Ian! D. Allen
         Algonquin College
         National Capital FreeNet

Summary:

    Using a serial port, an X10 command interface module, and some
    software from the net, your Linux machine can talk and listen to X10
    events in your house.  You can turn on and off lights and appliances
    from a shell prompt (or via the CRON).  Add a few motion sensors and
    you can sit up in your third floor office and know what activity
    is happening in the rooms below.  Catch your teenager coming in
    at 4am with an X10 system log.  Turn off the kitchen light every
    15 minutes after midnight.  Turn on the front porch light when the
    motion sensor detects someone there.  Pop up an xmessage window on
    your display when someone steps onto the front porch.  Turn off the
    living room stereo when nobody is moving in the room.

    I will talk a bit about the X10 protocol and the issues that develop
    when you have 10 devices all talking at the same time on the same
    house wiring with no collision detection mechanism.

Speaker Bio:

    Ian! Allen <idallen@ncf.ca> currently has a day job as professor of
    Computer Studies at the Algonquin College Woodroffe Campus.  At night,
    in between marking IBM JCL and Bourne shell scripts and dodging his
    Web Cam, he writes little Perl and shell scripts to automate things
    on his Linux desktop and does volunteer system administration for the
    National Capital FreeNet.  He has an Honours BA in Psychology and
    a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, where
    he spent most of his time doing amateur theatre and rewriting Troff
    and the C Shell instead of working on his theses.  His first computer
    course was WATFIV (FORTRAN) on punch cards in 1974.  His first email
    account was "idallen" on a Waterloo Honeywell 6050 GECOS system in
    1976.  He has been programming on Unix since 1976 (V7 on a PDP-11)
    and the Internet since about 1981.  His first home computer was a
    VAXstation 3100 running Ultrix.  He acquired his first Intel computer
    (P166 Windows 95) in 1996 and his first Linux distribution (SuSE
    5.2) at an OCLUG meeting a few years later.  He currently has four
    computers on his home network and three or four in his Algonquin
    office network.  He ran 60 students in his Linux classes last term
    on an unauthorized surplus 486 with 32 MB of memory.  The machine
    cost $75 - monitor, keyboard, and mouse included.  He is married to
    midwife Jan Teevan and plays step-father to her three young adults,
    one of whom keeps asking why Microsoft Instant Messenger can't be
    downloaded into Corel Linux.  He has two favourite sayings:  (1)
    Less code is better code; and (2) If this were easy, everyone would
    be doing it.