SitePlayer_Telnet

Every once and a while its nice to leverage devices on you home network and be able to control them through misterhouse. Now that I am primarily in the embedded space and there are few ways to access RS232 Ports, I decided to use a SitePlayer Telnet device. In essence the device allows you to setup an rs232 port that can me controlled over standard ethernet networks.

Now that I have this working to my liking I can now move my good old X10 CM11A to the outlet on my fuse panel in the basement, without having to move my main misterhouse setup (and its associated 'other' peripherals)

I am currently using a Linksys nslu2 and am in the process of moving to a more powerful and utilitarian Pogoplug Pro Both the NSLU2 and teh Pogoplug are running embedded versions of Linux, and I have opted for the best open source distributions for each The NSLU2 is running OpenWRT, and the PogoPlug is running archlinux-arm. I won't go into setting these up here, as I want to focus on making remote rs232 available to whatever device is running the current misterhouse.

First off there is the hardware, the Siteplayer Telnet (~80 usd as of today) Goggle it for your best source

Next you will need to obtain, compile and install one additional piece of software for your linux box so go get remserial from LPC Computer consulting at this linkhttp://lpccomp.bc.ca/remserial/ if you are running an X86 version the pre-compiled binary may work for you, but building it is very straightforward

Copy the binary file into a location on your path (I'll use /usr/bin for discussion )

now we add the virtual device into our system, using the remserial program we just installed. Add the following line to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local for persistence: ... remserial -d -r [ip.addr.of.siteplayer] -p 23 -l /dev/remserial1 /dev/ptmx & ... replacing the [ip.addr.of.siteplayer] with just the ip address

Now we need to setup the Siteplayer to the appropriate settings for our serial device for the CM11A we need the rs232 set to 4800,8,N,1 with no parity. You do this through the web interface on the SitePlayer box (refer to the documentation that it came with)

Lastly to get things going set your CM11A port in your mh.private.ini file to /dev/remserial1

Plug in your CM11A directly into the SitePlayer rs232 and you are good to go (no adaptors, just straight plug in)..... anywhere on your network