X-10 Home Automation
I bought my first X-10 components in 1982. I've been turning lights, appliances on and off ever since. I next automated with a CP-290 interface. Christmas light automation was next. Now, I'm up to a CMA11 two way interface. X-10 stuff is cheap these days. Check out the X-10 homepage for some good package prices. There's plenty for sale on e-Bay, also. X-10 is pushing surveillance cameras and this type of hardware now. I'm not much interested in this stuff.
I've done automation of my Christmas lights for a number of years. Basically, I use a CP-290 interface, and send it 'X-10 Direct' command from a batch file. The program I wrote is in Visual Basic. I've included the program below. Basically, it uses the Com1 link to the CP-290. The program opens a text file the user writes in NotePad. Undocumented commands, such as "brighten' are available in the program. You'll need the Visual Basic 6 runtime libraries to run this software.
LINK to CP290 batch