Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P49: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 7 CONTROL HUBS localhost dev dev ttyS0 - - You will see how this is able to communicate with other machines in the Marple section later in this chapter. Additionally all Bearskin commands support init as a command argument so that it can prepare temporary log files adjust ownership permissions and launch any daemons as necessary. Typical Application Abstractions The currently supported abstractions are held in MINBASE bin and include all the necessary functionality. I ll cover these briefly pointing out the subtleties as necessary x10control This is a simple abstraction that invokes heyu to switch lamps and appliances on and off and dim lights. Because the arguments are unified between all Bearskin commands the invocation of this looks reversed to heyu making a typical call look like x10control default on bedroom_light. cdplayer For those still in love with those shiny plastic discs this controls the CD player with cdcd and retrieves its track listing using the cddb-tool package. Because the retrieval of this data can be quite slow the track data is temporarily stored in var log minerva so that it can be queried instantly with commands such as cdplayer default currentname. mp3player This is a general-purpose media player that also processes the ID3 tags inside the MP3 to report the current artist and album with mp3player default artist for example. It uses var log minerva to store this information along with the current process ID which allows you to move through the tracks with mp3player default next. It abstracts mplayer while making use of mp3info to parse the ID3 tags. wavplayer This is a simpler primarily synchronous audio player used for general house alerts using play. mixer This adjusts the relative volumes of each channel in the audio mixer the names of which have also been abstracted so that user-friendly words such as master cd and recording can be used. It allows you to set the volumes as either a relative or absolute value between 0 and 100 .
