There are quite a few HOWTOs out here like this one:
http://www.linuxhq.com/ldp/howto/mini/Home-Electrical-Control/index.html
which basically drives a relay switch off of the parallel port of a Linux box.
I built one of these and they work really nice. After building it, I had it
hooked up to the ||port of my webserver in my apartment. I then had my
Christmas lights plugged into it. A Perl CGI script on my webserver allowed
surfers to go and switch the lights on and off on demand. Since I had a live
webcam on the room as well, they could watch the room light up and go dark.
Went pretty well and was fairly entertaining until some jerk went and
programmed a script to sit there and turn it on and off as fast as possible.
That put an end to that.
Even if you're not a whiz with a soldering iron, it's easy to make. Let me
know if you need schematics and I'll try to dig my device out and write them
down.
Tarsi
--
----------------------------
http://tarsi.binhost.com
http://www.foreverbeyond.org
http://www.binhost.com
----------------------------
Received on Sat Jun 28 2003 - 09:04:01 BST