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Home Automation Tips and Tricks Archive
Updated April 2001

X-10 Jammer!

Stephen Buol scbuol@collins.rockwell.com

If you own a Stanley "Lightmaker" garage door opener (www.smarthome.com P/N 7454GO), you should be aware of the hidden feature inside this opener...a built-in X-10 Jammer!

The Lightmaker door opener was designed to transmit X-10 commands when the door is opened or closed, which allows your HCS II or JDS Plus to monitor garage door activity. The remote controls for your car or SUV contain the normal door opener button plus another button to control any X-10 device in or around your home. This is why I spent the extra money to buy the Lightmaker door opener.

Now for the hidden feature. If your garage door ever becomes interrupted during an open or close command, (like when the door contacts a toy in the doorway, too much friction on the door guide rails, or in my case, when the garage concrete floor had heaved upward during very cold weather), the safety feature on the door immediately reverses the door and opens up the door. To inform you of this situation, the Lightmaker circuitry flashes the garage door light bulb on and off, until you reset the opener. What I discovered by accident, is that in this door reversal flashing bulb mode, the Lightmaker floods your power lines with X-10 commands. This trash continues until you reset your door opener.

From a home automation standpoint, your entire HCS or JDS control system is brought to its knees because the Lightmaker is flooding the power lines, just like a jammer. No other X-10 commands can be sent or received until the door is reset.

If that was not enough, another hidden feature of the Lightmaker design is that if you have a stuck X-10 transmitter in your home automation system, which continues to send X-10 commands, the door opener can not hear the command from your car to open the garage door. You have now "locked down" your door opener. I saw this problem when a sensor connected to a Plug N Power wireless (R/S 61-2676) transmitter got stuck on, and the transmitter flooded the power lines with "on" commands. We could not open the garage until I found and resolved the stuck transmitter.

I contacted Stanley about their X-10 design, and they recommended not using other X-10 appliances in your house with their Lightmaker. My advice to you is, disable the Stanley X-10 transmit circuitry, and control the door with a standard wireless transmitter/receiver module. An easy way to disable the Lightmaker built-in transmitter/jammer is to install a computer style powerstrip next to the garage door opener, and power the Lightmaker through the filtered power strip. The filters inside the power strip will block the Lightmaker jammer signals from getting into your house power lines, and prevent the door opener from bringing down your entire home automation system.

X10 Wants

Don Kleppinger Don.Kleppinger@Den.Galileo.com

In reference to http://hometoys.com/htinews/jun98/columns/need0303.htm  I know this article is very old so I don't know if you're still collecting a "want list" from users but this is what I would like to see.

* Whoever designed the X10 remotes to use the same button to turn all lights on as to turn the TV on made a major design error. I was hoping to save some electricity using X10 but the kids are constantly turning every light in the house on when they really meant to turn on the TV. "All Lights on" should be on completely separate button that is difficult to press or can be disabled. I want a learning remote that has separate buttons for X10.

* The small motion detectors should have switches positions to set the house/unit & delay times. Having to reprogram the device when you change the batteries is not acceptable. There also needs to be a DC power connector so that it can be plugged in if desired.

* Why can I buy a simple appliance module that plugs in to an outlet for less than $10 but one in the form of a light switch (to control fluorescent lights) costs $50-100 and up. It seems it would just be a matter of repackaging the relay into the existing light switch form factor. * Why can't someone make a X10 light switch that looks like a regular switch instead of a button. * The Inductive switches (decora style) and Other decora style switches that support local dimming should have the dimming control separate from the on/off control. Having to tap the switch just right to turn it on or off is annoying and confusing to someone not familiar with this type of switch. * Would like to see a power status module that can be plugged into a light socket or outlet that simply responds to status requests to tell me if the light is on or off.

Using X10 to control CD player

Mark Elzinga mark.elzinga@intel.com

Using X10 to control CD player in a whole house audio system from any room in the house

Components needed:

You can build a very simple circuit that is very inexpensive (around $5 - $15 depending on what you have) that plugs into a parallel port. An extra cable can be run from the back of the computer (connected to DB25-2 & DB25-18) to the room that has the audio system you want to control. It could be a CD player, DVD player, LaserDisc, Satellite, etc - basically anything that uses an IR remote.

I built the circuit in a few minutes, and the software (powerir.exe) worked immediately. With a few tries, I got it to learn all my remote codes and save them as files. Then I wrote a simple VBA macro using the Visual Basic Editor included with Microsoft Word. Using the 'x10event' callback function (as described in http://www.keware.com/ahax/docs.htm ), I was able to create a simple program that listened to all X10 commands. Then I added a simple one line statement that used the 'shell' command in Visual Basic to "playback" the learned IR code depending on what the X10 command was.