Re: Water heater eating X-10 signal

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>So what exactly would I be looking at on the screen if I opened up my ESM1
>and instead of ruining it (just a comment on my soldering skills or lack
>thereof), I miraculously was able to solder two wires to the right PIC pins
>and to ground (I assume) and hook them up to a miniature (or is it submini?)
>stereo jack. Would that output feed directly into the AUX input of a sound
>card, hopefully one on a laptop?

Give me a few days and I'll try to put together a web page with
"eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows". I've been
really struggling lately with my spinal cord injury (I may soon need a power
chair - what did your dad's cost?) and need to repair/replace the network
switch that failed yesterday before I try to tackle this. I cannot access my
network HDD (which is where I store pics) until that's done. Tasks which
used to take an hour or two now take days or weeks.

While the details may change once I get into the nitty-gritty, I will
probably recommend just soldering a jack to the ESM1. I have some 3.5mm M/F
stereo extension cables that I got from All Electronics or one of the other
surplus dealers. I'm sure Ratshack sells something similar. I'll cut one
asunder and solder the female end to the ESM1. There's no room to mount a
bulkhead type jack internally but the lead can pass through the case and I
can then design a small adapter board with voltage dividers and/or clamping
diodes to prevent damage to the soundcard. The male end of the cable can
then connect the external adapter to the soundcard input. In this way, the
ESM1 is unaltered (except for the connector dongle) when the external
circuitry is unplugged.

You need to use "line-in" although an "aux" input is probably the same (I've
just never seen one labelled "aux".) and I would suggest, out of an
abundance of caution, that a separate sound card (PCI or USB) would be safer
than the built-in soundcard emulation of most laptops (many of which do not
have "line-in" but only "mic" which will not work for this.