MaxBotix makes a series of very nice little sonar range finders that have found their way into my heart and from there into XTension 6.

They are tiny, inexpensive and come in a variety of beam widths. They require very little power at 2.5 to 5v so are easily powered even over longer distances just with another pair on a length of cat5. I can imagine a myriad of uses for home automation but my first project will be mounting one under each of our garage door openers to measure the length from it to the floor or to the top of the car. I can now tell if a car is actually present in the garage which is a much better indication of who is home and who just went out than trying to track garage door openings and closings. Since they are able to check the height of what is under them they can tell the difference between a car parked in the garage and say, my table saw left in the middle of a space.

As my son graduated from happily gurgling to himself wherever you set him down to actively seeking out trouble, I found myself without a good way to lock up all the X10 modules that were so perfectly laid out all over the house at his level. My house is now a fascinating collection of in-use covers and these things:

Basic XTension Scripting: #1

There will come a time when you run out of buttons. On the main wall of my living room I already have 2 "stick-a-switches" running various scripts and controlling the scenes for my living room. There just aren't enough buttons on them to do all that I want. I could stick up a third one... but at some point we cross the line between useful and just silly.

For some of the buttons I have chosen to add some functionality if I press the button twice. It's very simple to do and works very well. This article outlines the idea

This article is a continuation of the original Compact Florescent Bulbs and X10 article.

Using CFL bulbs with X10 and other home automation hardware can be prone to problems and expensive. Since they often dont want to work with the cheaper switches and modules. Without some modification some wont work at all. I've been using compact florescent bulbs with my system for several years and, just about every light in the house that is used for any length of time (meaning not closets and such) that I don't want to dim has been replaced with a CF bulb. All of them are controllable, reliably, with XTension.

With continuing news items about the banning of filament light bulbs and the continuing improvement in quality of compact florescent light bulbs there is quite a bit of interest in using these with Xtension. I use a LOT of CF bulbs in my system and thought I would outline some of what I've learned in a few articles here. First I'll just tell you what I know about CF bulbs in general and then get down to the specifics of using them with X10.

Here's a quick rundown on the pros and cons of the currently available X10 interfaces that are supported by XTension. If you want to control X10 devices from XTension you'll need at least one of these.

I had an X10 wall switch go deaf on me last week for a very interesting reason. I added a 4th X10 wall switch to the box in my front hall. There were 3 there already handling my front yard floodlight, front porch lights and the front hall chandelier that have been working fine for years. After adding a 4th for the new sconce in the hallway the chandelier light stopped responding in the evening, but worked fine in the morning and afternoon. It would turn on with my sunset script, but would not turn off again or dim to it's nightlight setting when I told my XTension machine that I was going to bed.

Ones first assumption when a light will not work at a specific time is to look for some other device, power supply, battery charger, CF bulb, computer power supply, or something that was on in the evening but that wasn't on in the morning and afternoon when the light was working fine. And I did this after the family was in bed one evening I went around and unplugged or turned off everything I could find to no effect at all.

With a compatible receiver XTension can use any of the X10 wireless security devices. These include the security motion sensors (MS10) and the door/window sensors (DS10.) One of the features of these devices is that they check in every so often to let you know their status and send you the state of their battery. With the regular X10 motion sensors the only way to know that the battery is dead is to wait till they stop working. (actually, the most common mode of battery failure for those for me is that during the night the batteries cool off and their voltage goes so low that the hawkeye resets it's address to A1 and in the morning when the batteries warm up enough to start working again you get no actions on your movements but a lot of A1 ON's received in the log so you know that one has gone dead during the night.)

XTension receives this battery status message and will set a unit property called "low batt" when it receives it as well as logging a message to the log for you. But scanning the log for these messages isn't the best way to find out which units are reporting a problem. This tutorial will walk you through creating a list that will show you any units reporting low battery messages.

Even given the wonderfulness of a modern operating system like OSX, it is sometimes necessary to script a restart. I've had USB device issues, networking issues or external device issues that would only resolve themselves by restarting the computer. This is very easy to do on a Mac, the script need only say:

tell app "Finder" to restart

But if you just put that into a global script in XTension you'll run into problems that could stop the restart process and leave your computer with half the apps quit and a modal dialog telling you about an error. Here's why, XTension would be telling the Finder to restart and waiting for it's response. Then the Finder will tell all the apps to quit, including XTension before restarting. But XTension wont quit because it has an outstanding apple event to the finder. And you see that it would get stuck at that point. So the answer involves using the "Ignoring Application Responses" block as well as putting the applescript into a separate application. So open up the script editor and enter this script: