All the lights on my workbench have a switch, why not use that? Personally I have two specific projects in mind; Network printer power I have half a dozen printers scattered all over the house, and they are rapidly being connected to my home network. It would be real nice to leave them all off until printing needed doing, then to be able to turn on any printer remotely from any computer followed by powering down after some reasonable interval. Laserprinters are right at the edge of what X10 will handle. Huge audiophile audio and AV system. Same thing, half a dozen items that use a lot of power, ie amps, or get used up (older gear with expensive to replace dial lamps), that should be off most of the time, and I would like to power up fairly automatically. Now its not too likely I will be running out to buy one of these $500 power strips, but you can bet I will be looking for them in surplus etc.

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 11:41:34PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: Yes I've wanted to do this too. Actually the 3-prong appliance module ought to be enough for a printer. My experience is that the X10 toys aren't long-term reliable. Since 1997 when I got started, I have had 2 light switches fail (one liked to oscillate instead of switch on or off; the other was for the bathroom, and got used enough that its pushbutton contacts failed), an X10 switched outlet failed after only a few months, another outlet sometimes switches itself on with no input like some kind of poltergeist (but it has been a while since that happened...) and some others are just generally flaky (don't receive the commands sometimes). A couple weeks ago I set up a relay controlled by a Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire switch chip (well, actually a small one-wire relay from PointSix, controlling a bigger relay) to control the booster pump for my pool cleaner. That's working OK so far, we'll see about the long term. For now a computer in the house is controlling it (a cron job) but I want to put a TINI in the garage one of these days. The 1-wire stuff could potentially be more reliable than X10 but you do have to have extra control wires (one signal wire for the serial bus, plus a ground). A spare pair in a telephone cable works OK. Or, you could use CAN bus, that has a long track record, and there are TINI systems which can use that bus as well. Next I want to try to build a DC control board using a 1-wire switch chip and a FET, to control either relays or sprinkler solenoids. For a serial printer, a TINI could be used both to put it onto the network and control its power (along with the same sort of 1-wire relay lashup). -- _______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud(a)bigfoot.com (_ | |_) http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud kb7pwd(a)kb7pwd.ampr.org __) | | \________________________________________________________________

Do you know what I mean by, the urge to engineer? It is the irresistable force that makes us tinkering types want to make something instead of doing it. ;) Maybe that is why I have ended up doing process control work so many times. Its just fun to turn stuff on and off with the computer, and the bigger the mess of stuff, the better.

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Tony Duell wrote: They still make the Appliance Module. I used it to switch PCs on/off remotely...they worked great. The remote unit was the TR552 Telephone Responder. Hook it up to a line, it'll anwser about 40 seconds after the first ring with 3 beeps. You can key in a 3-digit access code (if you have it set for an access code, otherwise it's wide open) and then you can select the module you want to operate (it could handle up to eight, 1-8) by hitting the appropriate touch tone, then * for on and # for off. After every on or off operation it would beep three times to confirm. Saved my ass from having to drive a couple hours to reset a computer dozens of times. Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org