forum.excito.com

I bought a Bubba to use as a low cost, low power gateway for my X10 system that I can leave on permanently. It took less than 5 days to arrive.

I use X10 to control lights and curtains in my home. It is also integrated with the security system. For example, when I arm the security system my external lights turn off if they are on, or I can turn the external lights on and off from the security keyfob.

Bubba will enable me to control and monitor the house from the web, and will send me e-mails or sms messages when security problems occur. This can include fire and flooding.

I can then use web enabled devices, like mobile phones, to control the lights.

I loaded a gcc compiler and then Heyu, which is the X10 interface. I am initially using Blue Lava as my web interface but will eventually build my own using Ruby. I use a USB to Serial adaptor to interface Bubba with the X10 CM11 Computer Interface.

In time, I will add on some cameras, which I can turn on when there is a problem.

This sounds really interesting. I would really like to connect a USB camera and motion detection software onto my Bubba to act as a remote security monitoring system.

Any more information or experiences would be great !

I am planning to use web-enabled cameras controlled at the mains using X10 and normally off.

I would then use the security system to detect a problem.

I can then remotely turn on the cameras and have a look at what caused the problem. My emphasis is on keeping the overall power usage of the system as low as reasonable.

That's the plan anyway.

Clive,

I'm using my webcam together with the package "motion" from the debian repositories, it is quite configurable and will successfully grab images whenever there is some motion in the webcams field of view.

Depending on what camera you have you'll probably need to compile kernel drivers for it.
I used the gspca driver together with Video4Linux device driver.

check if your camera is supported by that driver at http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html if not you'll need to find drivers elsewhere

Good luck!
/Bjorn

I have now documented how I am automating my house and published on the web. My bubba is the always on server that sits at the heart of this. See http://www.tuson.org.uk