[Coco] Fun things that can be done with a coco..

[George Ramsower]

 A Coco is a very powerful tool!!

 It's not blindingly fast, but it has enough power to operate some things 
faster than needed.

 I have used Cocos to open and close windows in my house, monitor the 
weather, page my beeper(that's an old thing), move objects and even tell me 
when the sun has come up.

 A coco can be easily wired up to things and the built in basic is easy to 
write simple softare to operate these devices.

 Controlling things around the house is a fun thing to do with a coco. 
There's lots of software and hardware available today for PCs to do this 
sort of thing. The most popular is the X10 protocall and it's simple, 
doesn't require speed and it's economical. However, the software available 
is for PCs( MS and Apple)! Ugh!

 A Color Computer can do everything that is required in this scenario to 
totally control your house. A coco uses a LOT less energy, the software to 
operate an X10 controller is simple and it's FUN!

 You can turn your electric water heater on and off at certain times, turn 
selected lights on and off at certain times or use motion detectors to turn 
lights on or off or to activate a siren. The possibilites are limitless.
 The X10 controller is programmable. The coco only needs to program the 
controller and the coco can be turned off after the controller is 
programmed.
 If monitoring things is important, such as switches from motion detectors, 
temperature switches, rain detectors or even a loud noise detectors, then a 
coco is the perfect tool to do this task.

 All we need is a simple driver to interpret our desired commands and send 
them to the X10 controller through a serial port. That's all.

 The hardware to enable us to detect those sensors is another story. It 
isn't available right now unless you use the joystick ports.

 I bet, if enough folks were to chime in here and express an interest, 
someone would come up with the things we need to do this, so we wouldn't 
have to run a five hundred watt PC to do what a coco can do with less than 
100 watts of electriciy.

 We have a lot of folks watching this list that have cocos. Who would be 
interested in using one to control your house? Speak up! Silence is golden 
but, in this case, silence is a lead balloon.



George