At 07:57 AM 9/18/2005, David Robbins wrote:
>You might take note, this is not a camera, it is just a usb video capture
>box and software. As such I doubt it could control x-10 devices in the
>house, unless maybe it has some other connection to a power line to send the
>commands to them. There is free or cheap software out on the web that does
>the web interface, video streaming, audio streaming, and even camera
>control.
Some googling for "home automation" or perusing the websites and/or
catalogs of places like http://www.smarthome.com/ will turn up all sorts of
stuff. One thing to remember on these sorts of applications is that
unintended interactions among the components is quite common, especially
with those that are end-of-life bargains. You might wind up with something
that has only Win95 drivers, or that may work perfectly by itself, but is
incompatible with some other widget.
There are significant advantages in buying from somewhere that has a
no-questions asked, no restocking fee policy for returns when it doesn't work.
Or, do as I do, and have a garage full of widgets that "almost
work". They're always handy for future projects.
The other thing is that home/station automation applications (if you expect
them to be 24/7) are fundamentally incompatible with other uses for the PC
(like don't expect to do email and web browsing on the machine that's doing
your controlling). These applications are computationally light, so you
can afford to dedicate a cheap $100-200 PC to them. Even running XPhome,
it will run for weeks without needing a reboot.
BTW, PCs and consumer operating systems are peculiarily clunky when it
comes to handling power outages. There's a lot to be said for purpose
designed controllers that have internal non-volatile memory that will come
back alive and functional without any user interaction required when power
returns: Think about firewall appliances vs running a firewall on a
PC. Or, compare the "hassle factor" of a sprinkler timer that's dedicated
with a 9V battery backup and has its own clock, to running your sprinklers
off a PC.
It all comes down to the problem of "remembering state" and "restoring
state" after an outage.
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