Looking at doing some home automation with an OSS twist? Then the following would be just for you…

What is the X10 FireCracker kit?
The X10 Firecracker kit is a simple wireless home automation system, consisting of a lamp module, an appliance module/radio receiver, a hand held wireless transmitter and a wireless transmitter that plugs into a standard RS-232 serial port. Using either the handheld transmitter or the serial port transmitter, a user can turn on or off any of up to 256 appliances, and brighten/dim any of those that happen to be lamps and plugged into the special lamp modules. Each appliance to be controlled must be plugged into its own module, and each module is set (by turning dials on the front) to a unique address by which it is identified. Software can also be downloaded from X10 to control the modules from a Windows machine. [Read the rest]