X10 Question

[Brian Staff]

I apologize if this is not the correct forum, but I have a question on X10. Is it possible for an X10 "control box" to show (say, with an LED maybe) whether a remote device is on/off?

I would like to control my water heater re-circulating pump (or garage drive-way lights) - devices I cannot normally see from inside the house.

I'm sure someone will just say "switch it on/off - then you will know" - but the notification on the re-circulating pump is useful to know whether it has been on or off, because it takes a few minutes for the water to get to the shower.

Will "Insteon" solve my problem? or anything else?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Bob F]

I believe there were some X10 devices which could be polled for their state, so a computerized controller could indicate it.

OP - a temp sensor on the water pipe could activate an LED.

comp.home.automation better covers his kind of topic.

Bob

[mm]

This won't be much help for you, but my car's burglar alarm, when used with the fancier more expensive remote, beeps back to acknowledge receipt of a signal**, and also changes the icon in the remote's window to show that the system is armed, or not, and that the vibration detector is on, or not. And also beeps when the siren goes off, which is what I wanted.

So, they plainly make what you want for other applications. Probablywouldn't be worth getting an alarm like this and trying to adapte it for your home.

OT **The remote has 5 buttons, but the only two beeps I know about are 1 beep for arm, 2 for disarm, 3 for arm if one zone is violated, and 4 for disarm if the alarm has gone off since it was last armed.

And my complaint is that if the regular remote is last used to arm or disarm the car, etc., it doesn't send out that signal to fancy remote. So if a man and his wife go out and the the one with the simple remote activates with the alarm, the fancy remote with the screen will say it's not, etc.

I wanted to leave the fancy remote by my bed, to know if the goes off while I'm sleeping, but if I use the cheap remote it won't do that.

So I bought from JCWhitney for 50 more dollars something that is only a remote beeper when the alarm sounds. At least that works, although I had to put a time delay on it so that it wouldn't go off when the siren in the car beeped on arming and disarming. What a pain all this can be.

[Milhouse Van Houten]

X-10 is one-way, no 'ack' signal is sent. It's 30 year old power line technology that is useful for non-critical apps.

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comp.home.automation

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[nicksanspam]

Au contraire. Some X10 controllers do read back status.

Nick

[dicko]

A better bet would be Z-wave. It has a positive acknowledgment back to the transmitter and the display on the remote control wont change until the ack is received. If the ack isnt received, there is usually ablinking led on the remote for a few seconds indicating that fact.

dickm

[Mark Lloyd]

It you use those, you're likely to have problems with collisions. X10 protocol has very poor collision detection and retransmission.

[Steve]

Go to the

site and use the Insteon devices to do what = you want to do. These use a positive acknowledgement and are really reliable. I = use a number of keypads to do exactly what you want to do, and it works = perfectly.

Steve

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 18:40:59 -0500, dicko put together some random words that came up with: