[portland] automated build notification via lava lamp or cuckoo clock, monkey w/cymbals, etc

[Micah Elliott]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Christopher Hiller
<chiller at decipherinc.com> wrote:
>
> We have an automated build process and I would like to integrate it with
> red/green lava lamps or something of that sort.

Cool idea.  I've been planning to get to that point one of these
days.

>  I know absolutely nothing about "home automation" or the
> hardware necessary to do this sort of thing.

Neither did I.  I'm a total softie.  But there's not much to it.

> Whatever HW solution we come up with must be USB (no serial
> port) and work with Ubuntu.

I had an X10 setup (very cheap, $7/switch, maybe $10/outlet,
and I want to say $20 for the serial port controller) working on
a Red Hat system in my home maybe 6 years ago.  Really easy to
configure the device IDs.  So you could just plug the lamp/monkey
into a controlled outlet.  That's the last time I looked into
this.  I was turning on lights etc from cron jobs.  The interface
was via a really crufty Java-written text-based description file.
I'd be interested to know what progress has been made since then.
Surely X10 supports USB by now.  I use Ubuntu now too.

I'll start looking into it, but would also be interested to hear
of others' experiences.

-- 
@MicahElliott | mde at MicahElliott.com | http://MicahElliott.com