This year's Halloween I wanted to be able to place my fog machine out in the yard. The problem was that the wired remote for it is only 6 feet long. This is how I used X10 to control it remotely.
The fog machine has a ready indicator light that I wired to a
120volt relay. The N/O contacts of the relay I then connected to a
X10 powerflash module. The setting I used on the powerflash was input "B" and mode "3", and set the house/unit to "F1". I then wired another relay to a X10 appliance module set to house/unit "F2". I connected the N/O contacts of the second relay to the wires of the fog machine remote. With this setup I could put the fog machine out in the yard and have a
X10 lamp module set to "F1" so that I could see when the fog machine was ready and use a
X10 remote to turn "F2" on/off activating the fog machine.
I took this one step farther as I used HomeSeer to control the fog machine. I setup "F1" fog machine ready device and "F2" fog machine device. I then created an event fog machine that would run as a recurring event every minute turning the F2 on for 10 seconds. I had another event that triggered on the status change of F1 which would enable or disable the fog machine event in HomeSeer. This worked out really well and ran all night.
The Pod
11-02-2007, 10:20 PM
How to use X10 to control fog machine
Linear Mode
