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To: Steve Passe <smp@csn.net>
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From: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
Subject: Re: Activehome X10 Interface 
References: <199706232053.OAA07518@Ilsa.StevesCafe.com> 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 23 Jun 1997 14:53:15 MDT."
             <199706232053.OAA07518@Ilsa.StevesCafe.com> 
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Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 23:20:30 -0400
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I just looked at this code again, and the CM11 protocol specification.  I think
that the whole RI issue is a bit of a red herring; it's useful in the instance
where the attached computer is powered down, and needs to be poked to start up
again to handle received X10 traffic.  

Based on the documentation (and consistent with the code) the RI signal is
asserted when an X10 transmission begins to be received.  Once the CM11 has
received the multibyte sequence, it will begin to poll the computer once
per second with a request (single byte of 0x5a) to have it's buffer read.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to adapt the xtend program to talk to the
CM11 interface, or teach the other daemon tricks.  I'm probably going to
do neither, and build a front-end with scotty to represent the state of
all the x10 devices with a MIB.  Applications would interact with it using
SNMP.  This separates the policy from the device, which seems to be a rather
common theme for X10 software.  (Given that most of the X10 computer interfaces
have their own particular brain-damage, this is hardly surprising.)

louie


louie