Comments on: Getting your X10 CM17A Firecracker Module Working in Linux

By: Marc Perkel

Marc Perkel — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:08:28 +0000

I had to send a heyu freset command (USB Port) before it worked.

By: U-notez » Automate Your Christmas Lights! - Unitz LLC

U-notez » Automate Your Christmas Lights! - Unitz LLC — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:34:33 +0000

[...] This same approach can be used with other operating systems. In Linux it can be done with bash scripts and cron jobs – the following explains how to control the CM17a in Linux. [...]

By: Andrew Wells

Andrew Wells — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:29:51 +0000

Glad to see you were able to get it working. I will update this post to recommend a system-wide configuration file to avoid problems such as this.

By: imali

imali — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:48:34 +0000

Just an update on this….I managed to get the PHP example working. It was indeed user and groups issue. I didn’t do the full HEYU reinstall but added the user www-data to the tty group under linux and that seems to have resolved the issue.

By: Andrew Wells

Andrew Wells — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:28:27 +0000

Changing the ownership of the index.php file won’t change the run-time user of the script unless you have suphp or suexec installed. On most systems, web scripts are run as www-data. You can verify that by running the following code in a php script:

< ?php echo shell_exec("whoami"); ?>
You may have to change the quotes back to the non-fancy ones as WordPress likes to mess with them.

I would recommend reinstalling heyu and specify the option for a global config file so it can be accessed under multiple users, or create another config file under the same user as your web interface.

Keep me updated

By: imali

imali — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:15:16 +0000

Right, I’m getting a bit further now. Added the full path as suggested and still nothing. So I echo $command and I get “heyu -c /home/user/.heyu/x10config on A2 2>&1″ If I copy/paste this into the terminal it works fine. but nothing through the web interface.

echoing $output now gives “Unable to write in Heyu directory ‘/home/user/.heyu/’ HEYU: Can’t open tty line. Check the permissions.” so you’re right it looks like a permissions problem.

I’ve changed the ownership of the x10config file from user to root, and the same for the index.php as well. this hasn’t helped.

Any further help would be appreciated

By: Andrew Wells

Andrew Wells — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:11:53 +0000

Hi imali, I’m pretty sure your problem is that Apache & PHP is running as a different user than what you normally run the command under, so it’s not finding the config file in your home directory.

Try adding the full path to the config file in the Heyu command. You can do that by passing the -c switch. Put this option before the rest of the command, so it will look like this:

heyu -c /home/user/.heyu/x10config [rest of command]

If you still run into problems, output the $command variable as well. Copy that into a terminal and see if it works there.

Let me know if that helps.

By: imali

imali — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:58:25 +0000

Hi Andrew, I’m trying to get an x10 web interface working using tht PHP example. I’m using a CM12u module through USB interface with Heyu. I can execute heyu commands direct from the command line but nothing happens when I try through the web interface. I’ve modified your php file only slightly by changing ‘fon’ and ‘foff’ commands to ‘on’ and ‘off’ but other than this everything is the same. Any suggestions? By the way I’m quite new to linux and php too.

Oh yes, I tried another thing also…at the top of the php file in the ‘if’ brackets i tried putting an echo “$output”; and this returned “unable to find Heyu configuration file’ in the webpage. I’ve not changed the default location of the x10config that comes with heyu….it’s in home/user/.heyu/x10config.

By: Andrew Wells

Andrew Wells — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:05:04 +0000

I haven’t heard about domus.link – I will have to check that out.

At the top of the PHP file, where the $command variable is, try echoing that command, and then manually copy it to a terminal. If the command runs, then you know it’s a PHP problem. If the command fails, then the script isn’t formatting the command correctly. The code may have to be altered accordingly.

Also, I never had to run the page as root, so that might be your problem. It should work at the normal user level.

Let me know if you get anywhere, and thanks for commenting .

By: laroseengineer

laroseengineer — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 02:55:25 +0000

I had the sample X10 php working (nice job by the way) and then I tried to use domus.link and I can no longer use the php web page to execute the commands. I can execute the heyu command from the command line but it won’t work through the web any more. Any ideas? I checked the web page and it is owned by root so it should work. No php configuration changes were made. The only thing that is different is I tried out domus.link. There is a X10state file in the /etc/heyu directory that I don’t believe was there before.