Effective 6/1/2011, Eaton is discontinuing their Home Heartbeat line of home automation products. Suppliers are beginning to dump their stock, and these once-expensive devices can be had for pennies on the (original retail) dollar. As these devices are ZigBee-based (details), I was curious to see just how hackable they are. Continue reading
There is no shortage of tutorials available on the net for building udev rules in Linux, and I don’t mean to belabor the point here or be excessively redundant, but it’s taken me a bit of trial and error to find a simple approach that works well. Here’s a simple recipe for defining a udev rule to alias a device. Continue reading
Purchased a four-port Keyspan USB/Serial converter to drive various RS232 serial devices via my home automation controller. Conveniently enough, Debian no longer includes the firmware for these devices due to licensing concerns (see DFSG). As of the time this article was written, the firmware was not included in the firmware-nonfree package available via apt. Fortunately, the files *ARE* included in the standard Linux kernel, and can be easily fetched and installed via git.
mh@misterhouse: mh $ aptitude install git-core mh@misterhouse: mh $ mkdir firmware && cd firmware mh@misterhouse: firmware $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git mh@misterhouse: firmware $ sudo mkdir /lib/firmware/keyspan mh@misterhouse: firmware $ sudo cp linux-firmware/keyspan/* /lib/firmware/keyspan/
Simply unplugging and re-inserting the device should then allow the driver to find the firmware and properly initialize the adapter.
Trials and tribulations encountered while installing Debian Squeeze on a new Intel D525MW motherboard. Probably a must-read for any Linux users interested in this motherboard. Continue reading