Python in home automation

[B Griggs]

Frank, all,

I responded to your initial message  (name was munged up - sorry.)  I am
very interested in Python home automation.  I have received a CM11A
controller and should be receiving a CM17A any day now.  I read the Mr.
House article in The Perl Journal and was intrigued.  You can do some pretty
neat stuff with X10.

I did some research and found Scott's XAL.  The thing that bothered me was
it is written in C and the X10 lib needs to be compiled natively before the
Python wrappers can be used.  The source is currently written to compile
under Unix, not Windows.  Not a problem in and of itself, but useless to me.

The question is- is it worthwhile to write this in Python.  Does it become
more portable.  I think so.  The only real challenge I see is serial access.
It seems as though each platform implements its' own serial support under
Python.  I believe 2 packages exist for Windows, for example.

Has anyone done any cross-platform dev in areas such as this?  In C we would
use IFDEFs.  I assume the best construct to handle the serial problem would
be simple conditional statements in Python?   More to the point, does anyone
know of a Python serial package that supports all Python platforms
magically?

Les - would love to have a look at your work.  If possible, email it.

I would like to have a go at writing a CM17A control class.  It would be the
simplest since the firecracker unit is not bi-directional.   The problem is
that once I am done I will have a class that supports Windows only.

I think I need to investigate how Perl has solved the serial support
cross-platform.  Am I missing something here?  Does Python provide some
magical serial support I am unaware of?



<kain at cableadmin.com> wrote in message
news:slrn8kvrup.ld1.kain at cableadmin.com...
> I recently took over maintenance of XAL which is the X10 Abstraction
> Library, as well as began writing Python modules for it.  The XAL
> site went up at sourceforge today (http://xal.sourceforge.net) and
> the pyX10 page will go up in a couple days at http://pyx10.sourceforge.net
> I would be very interested in working with anyone on python home
automation.
>
> -Scott
> sbarron @ ansic.net
>
> In article <fsteele-DDF9A7.16453020062000 at news.inet-systems.net>,
> Frank Steele wrote:
> >In article <m3r99swt4x.fsf at hare.demon.co.uk>, Les Smithson
> ><lsmithso at hare.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> I have some Python scripts that control a TWSER & TW523. This includes
> >> low-level drivers, and a higher-level server that lets you control X10
> >> over a network. I also wrote a simple TkInter GUI for controlling my
> >> X10 devices.
> >>
> >> A while ago I spoke to someone who hacked my code to work with a
> >> CM12U. We planned to rework this code to properly support both TW523
> >> and CM12U, but nothing ever came of it.
> >>
> >> Is it time to resurrect this?
> >>
> >
> >
> >I would certainly be interested in having a look and modifying these for
> >my own (sinister) purposes, after which I would be happy to share
> >changes back into the community.
> >
> >I had one other response, so I suppose we could actually try to work
> >together in an organized way to move the project forward....
> >
> >Any other takers?
> >
> >please-take-one-step-forward'ly y'rs,
> >
> >Frank
> >fsteele at mindspring.com
> >
> ><snip>
> >
> >>     >> So, is anyone aware of Python modules or extensions to do X10
> >>     >> home automation? I'm interested hearing about them on _any_
> >>     >> platform, but I intend to implement on Linux and MacOS....
> >>     >>
> >>     >> Thanks, Frank fsteele at mindspring.com