So, in my last post, I talked about my childhood dream of being able to turn my lights on and off from my bed. My straw setup was working well for a while until the masking tape started to fail and so straws would fall down and they’d leave a sticky goo on my wall that my parents we just thrilled about /sarcasm.
It was around 8ish years later (let’s say). We now had access to the world wide web at my house! WOW the future is mine!
I found out about a system called x10 (via banner ads) which would let me use the power lines of my house to automate switches or lights or anything that plugged in. This was awesome! This is just what I needed!
There was a problem though. I was poor. I had a job at a deli washing dishes once a week. That paid about $30/week or so and the bear minimum setup from the sites those banner ads linked to was something like $200! I didn’t have that kind of cash! I spent most of my money on CDs and umm skate boards? what did I spend my money on in high school? coffee shops? I dunno. Whatever late 90s early 2000s Jon spent his money on, it wasn’t going to be $200 automation setups when this straw thing was doing “ok.”
Enter eBay. On eBay, people were selling not the whole kit, but the bare parts of the setup for just 10s of dollars! Ah HA! I just needed to figure out which modules I would need to make my setup work. This was easy enough because it was listed on the x10 site.
I bought a transceiver module, a lamp module, and a remote control and I was off and running. I plugged my room’s lamp into the lamp module, set the x10 address to A2 (with x10, you could have addresses A-P and 1-9 allowing you many different devices on the same wiring network). A1 was reserved for the transceiver which I plugged into a different plug in my room. Now I could control 2 things in my room and I had the added functionality that I could dim my lights for night time reading and relaxing. This was AWESOME!