[ale] BottleRocket

[S. Eric Asberry]

I just got my firecracker kit in the mail today!  I didn't have to do the 
'cat' thing on the port,
but when I tried to run it as "br 1 ON" nothing happened and the program 
exited immediately, although it didn't given an error.  I even tried 
turning the verbosity up to the point that the program told me to get a 
life!  (Not the first time I've been told that, sadly ...).  I thought it 
was supposed to use house code "A" by default from the documentation.  But 
it finally hit me to try "br A1 ON" and presto-magic,  it sat there for a 
second or two, and it worked!

I think they have succeeded in hooking me!

I'm going to torture my wife tonight when she gets home.  I have one of the 
lamps in the living room set to turn on and off every five seconds for 
about two minutes via an at job (so I don't even have to be at the 
computer).  It takes so little to amuse me ...

I guess my only complaint is that I wish the handheld remote had more 
range.  My computer is upstairs ... since I can control everything from the 
computer, I'd like to keep the remote downstairs.  Unfortunately, it only 
works from downstairs if I'm right at the bottom of the stairway.  :(

Eric

PS: And I want everyone to know, I'm using the straight Linux command line 
software to control this, not the Windows software running under VMware!  :)




At 06:19 PM 7/14/99 -0800, cfowler at zfh-csg.penguinpowered.com wrote:

>I got the firecracker to work!
>
>I did this:
>
>cat </dev/firecracker &
>
>Then ran the program.  For some reason you must do this.  I would
>assum cat holds open the port and there are certain stty settings
>when this happens.  I have not had the time
>to really look at this.  Maybe someone else will know.  I went
>and bought the deluxe kit since I did get it to work.  Now cron
>will control the house!  Maybe at will get a little
>bit of usage too.  Like turn on a lamp when a process is finshed!
>  Turn on other lamps depending on return code.
>This could be fun
>
>Chris
>--- Original Message ---
>"Jim Popovitch" <jimpop at rocketship.com> Wrote on
>Wed, 14 Jul 1999 20:43:10 -0400
>  ------------------
>I took advantage of their "pay for shipping and we'll get you
>hooked" $6
>offer recently, and experienced the same thing w/ Mandrake 6.0.
>  I only
>wanted to fool around with it.  As things are, the devices sit
>on my desk
>collecting dust right now.  Still a $6 for 3 paperweights isn't
>too bad of a
>deal. ;-)
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <cfowler at zfh-csg.penguinpowered.com>
>To: <ale at ale.org>
>Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 7:40 PM
>Subject: [ale] BottleRocket
>
>
> >
> > Anyone here use BottleRocket?  I've purchased the X10 FireCracker
> > unit but have been unsucessful getting BottleRocket to work.
> >  I have tried on 3 Machines. 2 RH6.0 and 1 RH5.2.  The winbloze
> > program works fine.  Is there something that must be done in
> > the OS to get this device to work?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Chris Fowler
> >
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