I was planning to answer a question in a comment on previous post and wanted to talk about the number of xPL clients that I have running. Rather than just quoting the number, I thought I’d make a post to put my response in context. Most of my xPL components support the hbeat schema. So I can identify them by sending a hbeat.request message. My perl xpl-sender command can do this:

This is going to be the heart (or maybe that should be brain) of our automated home. At the moment it’s named “slave” after a computer from Blake’s Seven. If it works out well enough we might rename it “Orac” or “Zen”. I’m hoping there is enough space in there to fit in a PCI serial card and hide the VIOM in some of the spare space.

I spent a little time coding a Perl module to hide the details of bots. Had a little trouble with the Net::Jabber modules because I couldn’t find the XML stream socket to add to the select loop of the new module. I might email the author of the Net::Jabber modules to ask about this. After converting the two existing modules, I decided to take a look writing a temperature monitor using the Dallas 1-Wire stuff, that I’d been trying to find time to look at for a few days.

I looked at spread, but I was getting too many errors from the Perl API. So for now I’m going to use Jabber clients for the messaging infrastructure. I wrote two simple clients using the Net::Jabber perl modules. The first was for X10, that reports events and will take commands, and then a second for caller id, that will report calls/rings and will accept commands to send to the modem. These thumbnails link to genuine screenshots - edited only to remove my mobile number.