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Does anyone here have experience writing a program that would receive signals from Visonic, or other X10 sensors such as door detectors or motion detectors?

Essentially, I would like to write a program to replace a wireless alarm system, but I want to customize it to work a little differently.

I have seen an X10 USB transceiver available for purchase, but am hesitant to get it, because I don't know if I can program with it, or for sure whether it will work with the devices I already have purchased.

  1. Are X10 devices the same? Is an X10 receiver going to work with any X10 device or is it more diverse than that? (I will probably use Visonic wireless sensors)
  2. Have you ever used a USB receiver and successfully written a program to receive its signals? Do you have a code sample that successfully worked with a certain hardware? Did you run into problems?
  3. Do you have additional helpful information?

Edit: I am up for the idea of using Serial instead of USB

Passerby
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musicwithoutpaper
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2 Answers2

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  1. X10 devices are the same. However than only defines the power-line interface. It doesn't cover wireless accessories.
  2. Consider USB to serial adapters. Serial to X-10 devices exist.
Brian Carlton
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    According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard) It says that *"A wireless radio based protocol transport is also defined."* – musicwithoutpaper Sep 07 '12 at 17:49
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Im not familiar with X-10, but it should be normal serial communication.

If you need to send or receive any data using serial port (or USB to serial adapter) - It can be done in Windows/Linux command line.

Under Windows you will need PowerShell (free software from Microsoft).

Here is an example of serial communication.

DOS command for opening serial port in Windows 7

Btw, that title is wrong, there is no DOS in Windows 7 :)

Community
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Kamil
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