Mark J Cox

mark :: blog :: alarm

06 Sep 2004: Chocolate Alarm

I'm standing in the middle of Target when my phone vibrates to tell me there is an incoming SMS message, the message is from my home automation system and tells me that the alarm has been triggered. Then a second text to show it's a confirmed alarm. There's really not much I can do about it being a few thousand miles from home apart from try calling my partner or the neighbours. If I was in the UK I'd be able to bring up a little picture from the house cameras to see what was going on, but GPRS wasn't enabled for whatever roaming partner we have in New Hampshire. Anyway it turns out my partner had triggered it without noticing and she had left the house. The mobile conversation went along the lines of "oops - how do you cancel this thing?" "Sorry, Can't hear you, all the sirens in the background" "What?" "Hello?" "helloooo?" Anyway I'd forgotten that even after turning it off you had to reset the alarm to clear the events, and until then the HA system continued to shreak, wail, and flash the lights, probably to the delight of everyone in the chocolate isle of Target.

Mapopolis is working really well once you get used to it, it's managed to get me out of a number of sticky situations and it doesn't endlessly complain like TomTom if I decide to take an alternative route, it just makes a happy "ching" sound and gets on with rerouting you.

27 Sep 2002: UPS

Had a cold today so didn't get anything done on my presentation this evening, instead did something that required little work and hacked more Perl for the home automation system. There are now four jabber bots online, a common thread is that you can message them and get some status information, or send information to them to do, also if you've got them listed in your roster they'll send you an update with their status every minute.

At the moment the UPS bot tells you interesting status reports and notifies you of emergency things. The adsl bot tells you about the cable modem link signal strength and so on. The tivo bot is rather cool, it tells you what it's currently watching and a few status indicators, and in return you can pop up a message on the screen or send a message to be viewed in the message centre. The final X10 bot lets you control X10 things in the house, just some lights at the moment. It doesn't yet report the status, that seems not to work.

I'm having problems getting Perl to deal with the parallel ports correctly so I can't get the alarm, SMS or heating controls to work yet. Also these bots are complete hacks and return the information in psuedo-xml (random made up DTD) and I've not thought about messages vs groupchats vs iq oob for the data. Anyway much fun being able to message the living room lights to turn to 30% brightness

10 Feb 2002: More Alarm Fun

Played around with the alarm system (well the 'tamper' system works) but need some opto-isolation before I dare connect it up to the gateway. Got the gateway to SMS me when there is a power failure, which is semi-useful but really freaks out guests when I switch off the master power and my phone beeps a few seconds later. Took a few pics of the setup so far here.

I'm trying to stay away from coding for work for a month or two, just to see if it can be done. I've found it hard the last few years as I moved away from doing coding on a day to day basis; you tend to judge your week by how much code you've achieved. This of course doesn't scale when you get to be a manager and the temptation is to try to do a bit of coding for work every week in order to feel you have 'achieved something'. Last week I couldn't resist and ended up recoding some pages and scripts that were in PHP to work with AxKit. Doh.

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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