[Coco] [Color Computer] X10 driver

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 24 June 2007, George's Coco Address wrote:
>I figure I'll harp on this until I'm dead....
>
> I want someone to develop an OS9 driver for the X10 timer.
> If I knew how to do it, I would. However, I'm a dummy with assembly  and I
>just can't seem to wrap my head around the way OS9 does it.
>Doggonnit!  There are too many files and steps needed to make an executable.
>I get confused with all those darned files and I have no clue what they are.
>
> Yup! I'm an idiot.
>
>
>George

What's an x10 timer?  Brand & Model # please.

I don't know if that is possible George, the most recent (this past week) heyu 
built for linux, has at least 2 executables that are about a quarter meg in 
size. It has many bells and whistles that I have not explored, so I'd imagine 
that it could be stripped of many of them and still work for 99.9% of 
everydays tasks.  This now has drivers for the cm11a, the cm17 and some of 
the other aftermarket stuffs from SmartHome, so for cm11a use only, the rest 
of the drivers could be stripped, possibly even by compile time options.

Its written in c, and if my c.prep19 is used along with ansifront, its 
possible it could be built on the coco once the bells and whistles were 
excised.  I don't know enough of the internals to be a lot of help there, but 
the maintainer of heyu, Charles Sullivan, might be helpfull.  He has a 
heyu-users mailing list that isn't a heavy traffic list & copying that mail 
could be helpfull too.

I think its a given that it would need a real serial port as opposed to the 
bit banger though.  "The missing chip" article in the Rainbow would work for 
that I believe.

The only other concern I can think of ATM is that some of the interfaces will 
assert the serial ports RI line, the handling of which has often been to 
ignore it as long as the incoming data is properly acked, the interfaces 
generally won't care.

Go take a look at <http://www.heyu.org>

& see what you think.

The latest versions handle the repetitive stuffs by converting them to macro's 
that are then downloaded to the cm11a's 1kb flash memory so that the clock in 
the cm11a can execute them on schedule without any help from the host 
computer, and then heyu has only to handle such things as the eagle-eye's 
motion detector outputs, and what ever I might ask it to do from an x10 
palm-pad which links to heyu thru an RF501 sitting in the next socket beside 
the cm11a.  Like control xmms for background music when the next door 
neighbors and us are playing pool in the basement.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Please keep your hands off the secretary's reproducing equipment.