You’ve created a database of units, and a graphic view of your site.
You have lamps and appliances, and of course motion sensors.
Sensors usually need to have scripts attached to them to make them useful.
Movement sensors normally turn on lights and/or alarms.
Dusk sensors should turn have scripts attached which determine whether it is reasonable for the "Light Source" to be turning on and off at that time and system mode...
Outside, you might have PIR motion sensors which always turn on the lights in that area. These lights have their own X-10 modules, and respond directly to the ON/OFF commands from the PIR. The command is also seen by XTension, and is noted in the Log.
You may also want to have Laser Beam sensors which are not fooled by wind or O'Possums. These are different in that they can be set so that they only trigger when both of the dual laser beams are interrupted. This makes a very good indicator of a person or an automobile passing between the transmitter and receiver.
Inside, your home or any structure, the cheapest motion sensor, Passive Infra-Red (PIR) is a very good detector of any 'warm body' in that area.
Now create schedules for lights and appliances to suit your needs and lifestyle.
Create a 'morning wakeup' script which performs all the things that you would want each morning when you wake up. Turn on the coffee pot, begin brightening the bedside lamp, schedule the drapes to open in 30 minutes etc.
Then create a scheduled event which executes 'morning wakeup' every day. (maybe just weekdays?)
In use, XTension can appear as complex or as simple as you wish. All windows can be sent away and retrieved, and the app can be 'hidden' by the Finder.
You can keep as much or as little on screen at any time as you wish. Window positions are remembered.
At first you will want to watch everything at once, but you will surely want to minimize the number of windows when you want to work with other applications.
The simplest view is the limited world view, perhaps with a small list of your most important sensors.
Branching out
With XTension and AppleScript, you have few limits as to what you can do with your system. The biggest problem you will have is that of deciding just what you want to do.
Just how do you want the lights to behave when someone walks into the living room? Do they behave automatically or do you want to issue a remote command to turn them off or on?
What about time of day? Maybe if it's daylight, the lights shouldn't go on. And if the house is supposed to be empty, then how do you want to signal an alarm?
When you really get adventurous, make things happen on other Macintoshes:
Voice annunciation
Caller ID announcements.
Dialogs and warnings.
Take video clips of intruders in the same area.
Perfect Mates for XTension:
( see also Technotes regarding these)
The ADB I/O from the Beehive : 8 channels of I/O, both digital I/O and analog input . Connects to your ADB and is AppleScriptable.
Farallon’s Timbuktu remote control utility.
The Connectix serial camera :
command another macintosh to take a picture/movie
Big Island’s telephony agent “YoYo”:
scriptable caller ID, and pager dialing and messaging.
Modem/Fax devices :
announce arrival of faxes with caller ID...
TV/VCR Home Theater InfraRed control :
The SmartLinc can be trained to issue IR commands
whenever it receives specific X-10 commands...
Internet !
Already there are alarm monitor companies which have web-sites which take email messages from your system and automatically call the police or other phones that you specify. This service promises to be the cheapest and perhaps most reliable alarm monitor service of the future.
Programs such as NetScape and Eudora are scriptable and can be given commands which for example; connect to the net, send a message, and then disconnect.
Audio/Video surveillance
Cameras with audio are already on the market, at prices which are below $100 with software.
The Connectix gray-scale camera with microphone connects to a Macintosh serial port and its software is scriptable.
Connectix also makes a serial color camera for under $250.
Place Connectix cameras on the modem ports of any of the Macs on the network.
The capture application can be kept running in the background, or it can be started on demand by a script. Obviously, one should consider the delay if time is important.
Any script can send AppleEvents to an application, whether local or on another Mac on the network.
Teach your Mac to talk :
Several versions of MacinTalk which require various levels of processor speed and memory.
PlainTalk
MacinTalk 2
MacinTalk 3
MacinTalk/Pro
You may not have documentation, however XTension provides a simple verb to interface with whichever version you have installed :
speak "Glass Breakage in the dining room"
If you have multiple Macs on your network, you can also tell another Mac to 'speak'...
Talk back to your Mac :
Later models of the Macintosh provide excellent speech recognition.
You need only create scripts which have Names which are the same as the Phrase that you want to speak to trigger that script.
Put these scripts in the Speakable Items folder, turn on Speech Recognition, and from then on just speak:
