An Unexpected Journey

When I bought this neat looking lamp from Walmart, I had no idea that it'd help me discover the worst website on the entire internet.  But sure enough, my simple search for attractive, low cost lighting ended in horrors that are simply too chilling to go away without a mention.

The lamp itself is actually only a minor character in this story, the thing that set the ball rolling.   What really is to blame is the fact that I've been coworking with two of my friends here in New Haven for the last year or so.   A couple weeks ago, I moved into my new house and set up a nice office for the three of us, and this lamp was purchased in the process.

The Double Edged Sword

Usually, coworking in the same physical space as a few other folks is awesome for productivity.  The three of us do a good deal of contracting work for Madriska Media Group, and when we're working on a project together, we've reaped huge benefits from the direct interaction that can happen when everyone is together in the same room.  And since Jordan and I also happen to be working on bootstrapping a product company together, there is no shortage of things to talk about that are best done face to face.

But as we've come to find out, coworking is really just a force-multiplier for whatever we choose to focus our energies on.  On a particularly warm and lazy day, this cheap-ass Walmart lamp became our object of attention.  It somehow entered our head that we wanted to experiment with automating it so that we could tie it to a continuous integration system and have it start blinking ominously when someone broke the build.

This is of course, something that has been done before, and we talked a bit about how we might approach it.  The general consensus is that we could probably set up an Arduino to do it, but with none of us having the necessary experience, we figured hooking a microcontroller up to the house main power supply was probably a bad idea.  As we went back to work, I fully expected the idea to disappear into that place where "sounds like fun, but too scary" projects go to die.

Crazy Ideas Never Die, They Just Go To Sleep

Thanks to my house, the "blinking cheap-ass lamp" project idea came back with a vengeance today.  Although it's "my new house", that only means it's new to me, and being built in 1946, it's got its share of exciting problems.  My Dad being retired now means that I've been spending my weekends in "How to be a MAN" school, and learning all those things about home repair that I never learned when I was growing up.  And to be honest, I really feel lucky to be finally learning this stuff, because after renting for a while, I started to hate having to rely on others to fix stuff for me.  A house is a system, and it can be hacked just like anything else. 

Our main project today was trying to figure out how to wire up some Rube Goldberg machine to my garage door so that we can actually open and close it without having to do all sorts of acrobatics with the locking and unlocking of various doors.  We failed at that, but in the process, I found a fresh source of inspiration for my blinkenlights.   My garage door opener was controlled by a remote, and plugged into an ordinary AC outlet.   An RF remote doesn't require a lot of power, so I could safely tinker with programming something that controlled it without setting my house on fire or killing myself.

The Optimism of a True n00b

You can guess how I spent the rest of my afternoon.   Starting with Arduino because I thought it might be fun to play with, I stumbled across this neat thing called a CM17A which is basically a controller for wireless outlets and lightbulb sockets.

There is actually a pretty good article on this, which includes some sample code.  But manually wiring up an Arduino to this seemed way overkill for what was essentially just sending an on/off command, so I went in search of something similar that I could operate via the command line and possibly plug in via USB.  Turns out that there is a USB device (CM19A) that does pretty much the same thing, and has a Linux kernel module that you can just send raw commands to.  While I really do want to study Arduino at some point, this seemed more appropriate for such a simple project, and I was basically sold.

I did some searching around to learn more about how these things work, and read up a little bit on the X10 industry standard, which actually uses the house wiring to send commands to these units that actually control the on/off switch on the outlets.  Pretty interesting stuff, overall.  One peculiar thing though is that every forum post and blog I saw about these devices recommended buying them off of Ebay, but searching for the model numbers on Google all pretty much led to one place:  x10.com

Finally, the Horrors.

If you just google by the numbers, you end up on these hideous looking pages, such as this one for the CM19A:

But the fun doesn't stop there.  Should you actually be able to find the "Add to Cart" button and click it, you are treated to this dizzying array of awesomeness:

Unfortunately for x10.com, this is the point in which I just threw my hands up in the air and headed over to Ebay with part numbers in hand.  It is amazing to me that after this experience, I will trust complete strangers over what is supposedly a company that builds seriously cool shit.  Sadly, I am now left with serious doubt about that, simply because the experience was so downright rotten.

But hey, for about 20 bucks, I can get the parts I need on Ebay to at least try to get my lamp blinking like mad in my office.   On the bright side, if the parts I'm ordering are as well-crafted as this company's website, I might not even need to hook them up to a computer to make sure that happens!

After this whole ordeal, I don't know whether to laugh or cry about the experience.  But I'd at least like to say thank you to Walmart for indirectly providing me with such a transcendent experience.  While I usually am busy talking about how evil you are and how you're the source of all that's wrong in the world, one your products now serves as a constant reminder of something far more ugly than you are.