In 2009, I came up with the first version of my light control system.  This consisted of a clapper, a set of cheap computer speakers, and an audio recording of my clapping.  My original system used a web interface to have the speakers (connected to the web server / site) clap when I wanted the lights to come on.  This quickly became unmanageable since I couldn’t monitor the states of the lights without a webcam monitoring my room (and I wasn’t thrilled about securing a webcam in my room that could be hacked into).  This lead into X10 which has done wonders for me over the course of the past two years.

Its funny remembering back to when I first got an x10 system, because the x10 website doesn’t look like your average store, it looks more like an adult site with lots of flashy banners (ha ha).  I do have to admit, with x10, the initial impression was very deceiving for me, since their products are really good!  Anyways, moving on, My x10 system consists of a USB transceiver module (CM15A located here) which connects to my windows server that runs a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  In addition, I have several lamp modules, appliance modules, and remote control wall switches (which wirelessly communicate to the CM15A).

As for the software, I installed the ActiveHome software onto my server (that came with the CM15A).  This software installs a few application libraries (dlls) which enabled programmatic access to the CM15A to send and receive x10 commands over the power lines ran in my apartment.  Using this api, I wrote a quick program that makes a command line based program that can run certain commands.  I have to note that ActiveHome includes a default command line executable, but this didn’t have all the functionality that I wanted, most notably output in HTML for my web interface.  With the executable I wrote, I simply have the apache web server run the command as a local user which sends the x10 signals over the power lines ran in my apartment.  I should note that I considered using ASP.net which could interface with the API directly, but at the time I wasn’t very familiar with ASP.net and I wanted to use PHP.  I didn’t use IIS because I didn’t have the time to go permissions hunting to figure out why PHP wasn’t allowed to run programs as a local user on the web server through IIS.  Luckily a standard WAMP install that included Apache and PHP worked out of the box with little configuration.  The WAMP that I used was Vertrigo.

For the IR receiver that controls my projector, I use a USB-UIRT that I found on Ebay (I didn’t feel like waiting the estimated 6 weeks at the time for a new one).  Fortunately, the executable program that was included could send and receive signals from the USB-UIRT that I required, so I wrote some PHP that invokes it for the commands I used.

In 2009, I mentioned that voice control would make its way into my system.  I have to admit that it did!  Unfortunately, it didn’t last long because of all the bugs that I ran into.  I used the Microsoft speech libraries with a program called SmartButler, which could listen for speech commands and run commands on my server.  I initially used a cheap computer microphone, but quickly found that the interference in the audio made commands very inaccurate, and furthermore, if I held a conversation in the room, my lights would act up!  I figured that a USB professional Condenser Microphone would fix the problem, so I quickly ordered one and integrated it into my system.  This did significantly improve the quality of my system, but normal conversations would still occasionally trigger some of my web control panel controls inaccurately.  The final straw that broke the camel’s back (and caused this system to get removed) was when my RA (resident advisor), Stephanie came into the room, said hello to me and my lights went out of control (since I didn’t train it for a higher pitched, female voice, I’d assume).  I’d like to approach this problem in the future when I get the time to do it properly, but until then, I’ve been satisfied with web control panels that both my smartphone and computer can access.

Finally, at the very end of my video, I took a moment to show my Linksys PAP Adapter (VoIP, Voice over IP).  This works through a service from voip.ms.  Voip.ms is a prepaid service for VoIP adapters that allows you to buy a phone number for a very reasonable price (even 800 numbers).  They also have really reasonable rates and really good control for those phone numbers.  I thought I’d provide a plug for them since they are really good.

I would like to add that the Linksys adapter required an unfirewalled IP address to work properly (for incoming calls) in my experience.  It does have a NAT mode for this situation, but the university firewall constantly crushed this mode.  To get around this problem (and allow my web server for x10 to work properly), I implemented OpenVPN on my network and pulled in several public IP addresses and left them unfirewalled.  This solution worked well for me at UB, and I documented it fairly well in my OpenVPN post.

With nothing more to mention on the topic, here is the video that details my light control system and some other stuff.

Of course, I made many bloopers in this video (I improvised a lot!), so I thought the bloopers video would be appropriate.  Warning, there is a little language in it and the audio isn’t exactly balanced.

Disclaimer: I was not paid to endorse any of the products above (and I’m never paid to do that!).  I like to think that when I make a recommendation, it carries a lot of weight with it, which it should!

So, have you ever been asked the question “How many bureaucrats does it take to screw in a lightbulb ? ”
, or “How many consulting engineers does it take to change a light bulb?”, or even (my favorite): “How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?”.  I won’t answer these here since there are so many jokes and riddles, but if you are curious, look at these 2 addresses (my sources): http://wilk4.com/humor/humorm321.htm and http://www.twisted.dk/light.htm.

I now am faced with my own light bulb joke question, but this time, It isn’t a joke!  It is real life problem solving!

When I automated my room with X10, I began effectively controlling the power line interfaces in my room to physically turn on and turn off appliances and lights in my room.  I wrote an entire web page interface to control my lights from anywhere in the world with my mobile phone.  But I have a few applications for my room that are still not implemented fully, that is, controlling appliances with an infrared remote control (like the tv clicker) from my computer without using the remote and controlling the door lock remotely so my door will be open when I get to it.

I will not be automating the door lock for some time, but I did want to make IR control work in my room.  I purchased all the circuitry components from Radio Shack, and found a guide on building an IR remote for your computer here: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/86/2.  I then asked a few of my hardware oriented engineering buddies to help me build this circuit (I hate hardware, I’m a software person).  After numerous attempts, I got a crude version working.  Unfortunately, this version wasn’t strong enough, so I decided to purchase a commercial solution called usbuirt.  It now works perfectly and turns on a light bulb and a few other cool appliances in my room.

So what is this light bulb that takes an infrared input? Its my projector, quite simply.  My projector has a special (quite pricy too) lightbulb in it that makes it project a computer screen up on my wall.  I have gotten to the point where I didn’t want to control the project or stereo system via power control (it doesn’t let the bulb or equipment cool off enough), so I felt that controlling it by the remote so it could always stay on standby would be better.  My system now has a movie mode on it to where this stuff works automatically and I plan on implementing volume adjustments for next semester so the movie automatically stays at a reasonable level for the duration (using a microphone).  This was definitely a cool project to take on and I am so glad that I could get a few engineers together to have a little fun.

So to answer my original question… how many engineers does it take to turn on this light bulb?  Well, I need to be in this equation because I am the computer scientist that had the problem.  My friend John was in this because he helped me write the software (he is a Computer Engineer).  Two other friends of mine were also present, both Computer Engineers with intensive hardware knowledge with a good software knowledge.  I believe the answer to this equation is 4 engineers (since computer science is considered an engineering major here at UB).

In the near future, I will be implementing voice control using a condenser microphone.  For those of you who don’t know what this is, its a studio quality microphone that has very little interference to produce the clearest voice possible.  This mic also has a good pickup so the computer will hear me crystal clear across the room.  When I get this part of my project done within a few weeks, I plan on making a followup post providing some of my code (mostly PHP) and how it works.   I also plan on posting a video.

As always, thanks for reading and your comments are definitely appreciated!