Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P16:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 2 APPLIANCE HACKING Hardware Hacks The hacks in this category will involve changes you can make either to existing hardware or to new hardware you can easily build that controls or is controlled by an existing computer. Linksys NSLU2 The existing NSLU2 unit aka the Slug requires no hardware hacks to make it run any of the custom Linux firmwares covered earlier. However you can improve the unit with various hacks. Always On Like most consumer hardware the Slug has an on off button. For normal operation this is fine. But for a home automation system which is generally intended to work 24 7 like the rest of the house this can cause problems whenever there is a brief power outage since the machine then needs to be manually switched back on. Also if you are controlling the Slug s power remotely maybe through a timed X10 appliance module or stand-alone timer it won t fully turn on since it needs the button to be pressed. In the first instance there are obvious solutions here such as putting the Slug onto a UPS or keeping it accessible so you can manually control it. However these negate the benefits of it being cheap hidden and importantly for HA controllable. You can solve this by invalidating your warranty by performing one of several hardware hacks to ensure the machine always switches on when the power is applied. These vary from using USB Y-cables in various configurations to soldering components to the board. All are detailed with their relative merits online wiki HowTo ForcePowerAlwaysOn . Overclocking Prior to 2006 all Slugs ran slower than necessary since their CPUs were clocked at 133MHz despite the chip being designed to run at 266MHz. This technically meant the original versions were underclocked which means the following hack is known as de-underclocking rather than overclocking. If you log into your Slug through telnet or ssh depending on your firmware and type the following cat proc cpuinfo you ll see a BogoMIPS value indicating
