*twitches*

reading that name just brings up trauma of all the popups and popunders of that voyeuristic camera...

Bleeding from the eyeballs? Maybe it's ebola, maybe it's the X10 camera spam plague that afflicted the net for 5 years... occasionally you see the odd relic of that on archived sites.

I am wondering if I want to use the light controllers to control *gasp* lights.... and use an oldschool* voice recognition and control system to parody alexa...

I'm thinking of Elvira (Mistress of the Dark) to work the lights. Elvira turn lights on... etc... then maybe if you say Elvira, play music, she always picks Monster Mash or something... ask for anything else and she says something like "What am I? Your house maid?" and passes you over to Majel Roddenberry voice, (Startrek computer)

* Edit: How oldschool you say? Well I could start here.... https://mobile.twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/ … 480247414616071 (skip the first minute it's fluff/intro)

I feel like X10 is one of those things that people bought thinking it would be cool and futuristic. But then it ended up being more trouble than it was worth. So the stuff ended up in the closet and then later the trash.

Right, no point and drool interfaces for the masses.

Our province just started teasing the idea of super low overnight electricity rates. Which make sense because instantaneous market rate goes negative between midnight and six AM quite often (Aaargh, we've got more electricity than anyone is using, if you feed in now it will cost you!) and is generally close to zero... In extreme cases I've seen it go to -25 cents, I think that was a midweek mild spring night, nobody had the heat on, nobody had the air on, and there was a steady breeze that had all the wind turbines spinning merrily.

So that means I might be really motivated to wire stuff up to do useful things overnight... Think my breadmaker has it's own timer though.... then if I set up a machine to transcode movies it can time that itself... hmmm.. well in heating season, if the electricity is cheap enough maybe I'll use a light controller to drive a huge relay and switch on heaters at night to defray overnight fuel burning.

Hmmmm now I've found an IBM Home Director package selling for cheap, 1995 vintage, came with an Aptiva, controller, appliance module, light module, software... tempting.

I dunno how heavyweight the IBM software is though, if it needs high end 486 / low end pent, then that's not a machine I'd want running 24/7, if it works on 386sx or 486sx at min speed, so we're only sucking 5W or less, then maybe. Though actually it would be a PITA to run on 3x or 9x as it would need rebooting regularly due to stack soak on gdi.exe and user.exe

Anyway, anyone familiar with Home Director? Give me the dirt.

I got home with some more parts for this, two more light modules, mini control center and a garage door opener receiver.... I think I got another few in the meantime last year but forgot to mention it. Can now block up every outlet in the house with weird wallwarts 🤣 These are homelink branded so getting a nice pot pourri of different models, all the case/shells are identical though.

The mini controller is actually good because only had remotes with overused buttons and interface module for control and this will be a handy manual override that's wall tied so can be put somewhere central and not get lost.

Though I have another device which aims to integrate all home assistant techs and might use X10 too, though not sure if I've got to tweak the transmitter.

I lost track of that IBM home director kit I mentioned last post though, it was one of those "geniuses" that keeps deleting and reposting their ad every 6-48 hours.