Running a headless version of x4x?

[James Sentman]

On Sep 14, 2014, at 5:11 PM, Horst Brinker <horst-ml at cox.net> wrote:

> When I first moved from classic to x4x a few months ago, I had x4x using an old cm11 I have.  When I had confidence in the new setup and tore down my old classic system, I moved the lynx plc I have over to x4x.  Actually, that’s when the trouble started.  I vaguely seem to remember that classic let me play with xmit power/ receive sensitivity or some such with the Lynx, but I didn’t see that in x4x. But I could just be remembering wrong.  Maybe the easiest solution would be to go back to the cm11.

The commands you want are "set PLC receiver to" and "set PLC output to" and should definitely be available in the OSX version. The lynx did take some tweaking once in a while.  

> 
> In any case, I’m looking for an easy stop gap to get me through the winter.  The out building lights get the most work out on winter evenings since they are usually off after about 8:30.  I’m waiting to see what magic apple actually has in store with Yosemite home automation.  Once that is understood, I’m thinking of taking the z-wave plunge which should also solve the problem.  The outbuilding is physically close to my home, despite the power line cable distance.  I get a better wifi signal there than I do in my living room due to the geometry of my place, so that’s my network connection. I’ll skip the xtb-232 for now since I see the possibility of replacing the x-10 gear in the near term.
> 
> I might try the shared serial port idea. Tell me a bit more about how that might work, please.
> 
> I have noticed that at least with screen sharing, Mavericks allows multiple users to be logged in.  So running x4x under a ‘hidden’ account may well be doable. If not, the computer is always logged in anyway and as long as I can send events to that copy from the main box, I’ll have something usable. I remember classic had a way to issue remote commands to a second copy of xtension.  I never had reason to use it though, so don’t really know what the rules of that game are.  I thought that if I could have x4x running on the second box, I could always just use a shell script to run a remote ‘tell xtension to turnon/turnoff something’ applescript through ssh and be done. Though there may well be more elegant solutions.

If you have another CM11 handy then just putting it on a port on that mac out there and sharing the serial connection to the main mac is probably the easiest thing to do. Unfortunately there isn't any software to DO that just yet, but it's something I've been meaning to do forever anyway so give me little time. I often need creative projects as a break from the continual Cocoa testing that can really get a guy down after a while ;) AppleScript under OSX does still have the ability send events to remote machines, that does work but embedding passwords and such can be a challenge. So a version of XTension running out there being controlled from the master XTension is not impossible, and you could do something with the new json data things if it's just a few units. I've linked units in my friends house and my mother in laws house to mine using that, but just a couple it would become a lot to manage with more than that. I think the shared serial port is the best idea because we can do it in the background to be always running too no matter who's logged into the machine. The other IP to serial solutions that are easy and or cheap are all wired ethernet like the wiznet cards and while you can share your wireless connection to wired clients on OSX no problem, there is no interface to NAT settings necessary to route the incoming connection from XTension to it.

> 
> Yes, all of that wiznet and xbee radio stuff you guys keep talking about make me want to play, but I think things are in enough flux that I’ll be better off waiting for spring.  I only have a limited toy budget and an even more limited play time budget.  With so many potential options, it’s hard to pick the right one first time.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for the thoughts,

Coming from X10 you would not be unhappy with ZWave devices and a Vera Lite, which we've just seen on good sale on Amazon. Remember that XTension lets you have as many different interfaces connected as you want now, you dont have to switch over everything. Even if you get the vera and just 1 switch to start with you can slowly integrate the new tech as your time interest and budget allow.

Thanks,
 	James


James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com