The X10 company ( www.x10.com) makes a couple of computer interfaces for their X10 based switches. One of these is an in-line DB-9 serial device they call the Firecracker.

Tymm Twillman has a good discussion of the FireCracker and his Unix/Linux program for driving it (BottleRocket) at: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm

This looked like a great opportunity for a Tk front end to a nifty little program, and since I had a Firecracker I wanted to use from my Linux box...

The control.tcl program displays a drawing that you create with your favorite paint program (I used xfig), and then overlays little rectangles to represent where the X-10 controllers are installed. When your mouse passes over one of these rectangles, it displays an informative label, like "Coffee Pot". The controllers can be turned on and off by clicking them with left and right mouse buttons.

The control.tcl program has these features:

• Display a gif image.
• Add new controller rectangle.
• Edit the fields (label, X-10 code, type) associated with a controller icon.
• Display an informative label when the cursor enters a controller icon.
• Turn a controller on with a left-mouse-click.
• Turn a controller off with a right-mouse-click.
• Save current configuration.

This is a first pass, "Wow, it works!" project. Subject to change as I get time.