Could this be used with XTension?

[Thomas Henry]

James,

This is an excellent suggestion. Since I’ve gotten into the Raspberry Pi, I’m doing all kinds of things with it, but mostly "plug-and-play" as it is a full blown computer. I’ve used it for a media center, ham radio applications (SDR, serial control of a few radios), retro gaming, surveillance camera, etc. I really neat little device to which I’ve barely scratched the surface, as I keep finding things to check out.

As a sidebar, the Pi NoIR camera is superior to the Airsight cameras, if only for the tiny 5MP camera for about $30. Haven’t been able to get an MJPEG stream to get it into Video Pitcher (yet).

Arduino looks a little more difficult, but I really should give this a shot. Just understand, I’m a noob when it comes to a lot of this, so when I get into this, I’ll be reaching out ;)

So, I did some reading, from your site and XBee to get the idea. Let me see if I have this straight.

1. It seems I can connect the Arduino Fio to a RPi, but would need a 2nd power supply for the Fio. 
2. Then I can connect an XBee radio to all of that
3. Configure the radio hooked to the Fio and RPi
3. Don’t quite understand yet how to get the other radios “connected” to the things I want to control (spliced into the on/off switch?) but I did see how to setup a PowerSwitch Tail for AC devices I want to control wirelessly, and that might start running into some real $$$.
4. Configure those radios.
4. I would then setup new devices in Xtension.

From there, I’m guessing I can control stuff remotely from XTension through Web Remote. Of course, I can’t understand how to get dyndns setup to hook into it, but again, my noobiness is showing ;). But at least I’d be able to 

Question: How much RFi can I expect from either outside sources or from the XBee system itself to other things? Can it be hacked? 
As for WiFi, I have so many things hitting the 2.4 frequency that the network will take quite a hit. Until I get a direct ethernet connection from my Airsights (for example) to a Ethernet switch, I’m experiencing some slowdowns.

Sorry for the long post, but this really is a good idea. Thanks.

Tom

On Sep 11, 2014, at 10:50 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:

> Excellent :) Yes, you can do all that with them. But not with the cards by themselves, they just take a logic level input and handle the isolation and such of the relays. So you still need a controller. Any arduino or raspberry pi or anything like that will work..
> 
> If it were me I would use an Arduino Fio because of the built in port for an xBee radio. You can use a wifi xBee and put it on the wifi network, or you can use a regular xBee and control it through the XTension xBee mesh radio system like I do. I really like these little radios. There is even a Mac version of the configuration utility now so no more messing about in windows to set them up.
> 
> But any other way of getting data out to them will work too, long serial line, ethernet or wifi shield on the arduino and of course the pi already has ethernet and easy to add wifi (but much more expensive) 
> 
> But it might be an excellent excuse to get some arduino experience and start setting up an xBee network in the house. Once you have that working you'll think of lots of things to connect to it ;) In my house right now I've got the meter reader, a VFD display in my office showing the time/temp and motion alerts from the house, an RGB strip of lights, my large digit alarm clock from evilmadscience.com is connected to one for setting the time and displaying alerts in my bedroom, the under cabinet lights in the kitchen are controlled by one and probably more stuff I"m forgetting. Oh, the countdown timer I made for the kitchen that shows the kids how many minutes before we leave for the bus in the morning whether they have their pants on or not ;) 
> 
> But any way of getting data to one will work.
> 
> On Sep 11, 2014, at 10:42 AM, Thomas Henry <tjhjr at mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> Well, you got me there. I’m actually looking for stuff that I can do, lighting and speaker control initially come to mind.
>> 
>> These relays are cheap, and beg me to find something to do with them.
> 
> Thanks,
> 	James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com
> 
> 
> 
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