X10 Firecracker Class for the CM17A

X10 Firecracker (CM17A) PalmPad Controller submitted by Tom Pydeski X10 put out some nifty home control products that communicate over the power lines and respond to commands to turn on; turn off; dim; etc. The CM17A is an rf controlled device that receives rf commands from a remote or the "firecracker" rf pc interface and relays them to the device modules. The HouseCode can be any 1 of 16 (A through P) and each house code can handle any of 16 devices (1 to 16). Keware (http://www.homeseer.com/downloads/index.htm) had put out an open source usercontrol for the firecracker, but I changed it to make it a class module, in order to eliminate packaging an ocx with the project. I took X10's firecracker interface picture of the palmpad and added my own graphic buttons to simulate the button presses and hovering. I also added the ability to label the buttons with the device name. Additionally I found some neat code to rotate an image and implemented that in allowing the selection of a housecode via the palmpad 's rotary switch. I also added LED's for each device to indicate their on/off status and used a vertical progress bar to set the dim level. I implemented a device status for each device. Finally, I was able to figure out the all on and all off commands (which the firecracker does not support) and implemented them as well. Of course all of this is useless if you don't have the x10 hardware that it interfaces with and controls (http://www.x10.com/automation/ck18a_s_ps32.html) (They were practically giving away the firecracker starter kit a few years back.)