![[ppower logo]](ppower.jpg)
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Ppower, short for 'Penguin Power', is a piece of UNIX software for controlling x10 home automation equipment connected to the computer via a cm11a interface. It can be used to turn things on and off and lights dim and bright. In addition to controlling the x10 devices, it can receive commands sent to the x10 devices from other sources such as an x10 remote transceiver and execute commands on your system in response.
Ppower uses the GPL license.
The virtue of ppower is that it is designed to run as a daemon at all times, keeping track of the status of the X10 system, taking action on events, queueing requests, and providing information on the events it is receiving to any interested clients.
Relocated webpage.
The previous webhost for ppower is no more, so ppower has been moved to SourceForge.
Ppower 0.1.5 released.
Random crash on RedHat based systems fixed. Termios issues and a bug on Solaris fixed. Now uses syslog to log errors when in the background.
By the way, did you know you can create source and binary rpms from the tar file? Just do rpm -ta ppower-(version).tar.gz.
Ppower 0.1.4 released.
Major signal handling bugs fixed eliminating occasional zombie processes. Also, a RedHat spec file and init script are now included, modified from Rich West's contributed ones.
Source rpm contributed by Rich West.
Ppower 0.1.3 released.
Command timeout bug fixed that was affecting FreeBSD/Solaris and a possible fix for time updates.
If you are experiencing problems with ppower 0.1.2 try changing all "O_NONBLOCK" symbols in the code to "0". Please email me if this works for you. It's a temporary hack that might help with FreeBSD and Solaris systems.
Ppower 0.1.2 released.
Timeout bug fixed thanks to Dave Plonka and friends, ppower should work now on Solaris and possibly other picky UNIXes where it hadn't before.
Web page back up.
Due to stupidity beyond my control *cough* UCSD *cough*, the web page was down for a few days, that is now dealt with I hope.
Request features!
Know of a good feature to add or have seen something in the TODO file you want? Give me an email and I'll see about it. I'm not working on it full-time right now, so the project moves at the speed of email. :)
Ppower 0.1.1 released.
Many bugs fixed. The main ones were that macros couldn't handle more than one command correctly, quit during syscalls due to interruption, and ALIAS with more than one device wasn't working correctly.
Put up a real webpage instead of a quick kludge.
I'd like to hear from you about possible improvements to the software and if you managed to get it running. The only two systems I have access to compile this on are Linux and Solaris, and I can't really test it on the Solaris system. If you've managed to get it working, send me an email.
Ppower 0.1.0 released.
The latest version is 0.1.5.
Downloads are available through ppower's SourceForge page.You can create binary and source RPMs from the .tar.gz file by running "rpm -ta ppower-(version).tar.gz".
You can read the man pages for ppower and ppowerd here.
Ppower's ChangeLog.
You can contact the author via email at <swbrown@ucsd.edu>.
X10 Corporation, a place to get X10 hardware.
BlueLava, a web and wap cgi-based interface to X10 which supports ppower.
HEYU!, another X10 controller for Linux.
Xtend, provides X10->UNIX control as a companion to HEYU!.
X10 Corporation's documentation on the X10 protocol and CM11A interface.
BottleRocket, a FireCracker (cm17a) interface for Linux.
Linux Home Automation page by Neil Cherry.
Home control is a web-based front-end for ppower. You can control events or schedule events to happen at a certain time. Runs on Linux or Win32. HomeControl and HomeEvent are CGI scripts so they need to be run on a web server and called up in your browser.
- (C) 1999 Steven Brown <swbrown@ucsd.edu>