Greg In The Desert

Once you get your Home Automation system up and working the way you want, you start to become dependant on many of it’s features. In my living room, I don’t have a wall switch to turn on the lights. I have a wireless palm pad, but I rarely use that because the motion detectors (also wireless) usually turn those lights on for me.

Last week I came home from work and none of the lights came on. After a few hours of troubleshooting I find I’m getting errors in Indigo, “undefined byte from w800rf interface.” The” w800rf interface” is the W800RF32A, a wireless receiver that connects to the computer via serial port, or in my case a Keyspan USB to Serial Adapter and it receives wireless X10 signals.

Is the W800RF32A bad? Is it a issue with the serial adapter? Is it a driver issue? I used a terminal program and can see that I’m getting data from the W800RF32A, I just don’t know if it’s the correct data. I don’t want to spend $70 on a new W800RF32A only to find out it’s some other component. For now I’ve got a plugin device that will send wireless X10 commands to the powerline, but it only works on one house code and doesn’t work with security devices.

That’s not the only problem with my system. I moved a lot of my switches to Insteon several month ago, but I still have several X10 devices in the house. For some reason I was not able to change or get their status via the computer. This happens with X10 sometimes but the signal issues go away after a while (one of the reasons I’m getting away from X10). After a month it became clear that there was something else going on. Thanks to a hint from the Indigo message boards, I determined that the X10 part of the PowerLinc V2 interface’s had died. Smarthome sent me a replacement this week and sure enough X10 is functional again.

The Home Automation system works good, when it works. Right now it’s not working like I want and it’s annoying.

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