Home automation with Gentoo Linux and Heyu

Heyu is an excellent package for managing the X-10 CM11A serial interface (and some others, as well). I use it at home for automatically turning on and off lights. My home servers run Gentoo Linux, which gives a great amount of control over what packages are installed on your system and how these packages are compiled.

Unfortunately, heyu is not in the official Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) tree. So, here is an ebuild that can be placed in an overlay. It is a tar file, compressed with bz2. Download it to your machine and type tar xvjf heyu.tar.bz2

My overlay is at /usr/local/portage-overlay/ – you can choose any location you want, as long as you specify it in /etc/make.conf with the line

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage-overlay

Inside the chosen directory you’ll have one directory per Portage group. I placed heyu in the app-misc group.

If you use the same directories as I did, you’ll only need to uncompress the downloaded file into /usr/local/portage-overlay/app-misc/

Then you can edit your /etc/portage/package.keywords and add the line

app-misc/heyu ~x86

Then you can just emerge -a heyu

The Gentoo Wiki has further details on how to configure heyu.

If you decide to modify the ebuild I provide, don’t forget to run ebuild heyu-2.0.10_beta.ebuild digest to rewrite the digest and manifest

Also, if you would like to use “dawn” and “dusk” instead of fixed hours for turning your lights on/off, you’ll need to know your longitude/latitude. If you don’t know your coordinates, and don’t have a GPS handy, Google Maps can help (at least in the US). Just find your address in Google Maps, center the map around it and click on the link “Link to this page”. Look at the URL, and you’ll see &ll=xxx,xxx indicating your coordinates. Thanks to geocoder.us for the tip.

Enjoy !

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