Look here for a LIVE demo of my house. OFFLINE, i'm moving!!
Look here for the documentation on HOW to install paus!

Welcome

Don't pay too much attention to the design of this page, since i'm concentrating on the program, not on this page. :) This site is only intended to explain what PAUS is, and to attract new people that what to help with development. If you want to make a nice site for the project, contact me. (edwin@lazypeople.net)

Last updated: Wed Sep 18 2002

What is PAUS?

Paus is all about controlling "stuff" with easy scripts. You could for example make the light in your house go on and off in the way you specify. You also could use paus to create a remote controlled mp3box that also has a web-interface at the same time and shows the current song on an LCD display. :-)

With paus you can send and receive "events" from so called "modules":

• There are IO modules to control hardware, like lights and sensors.
• There's an UI module to control an universal userinterface.
• There's an IR module to receive events from remote controllers.
• There are many more to come.

How does it work?

In this diagram we see how events flow from one module to another. The scripting is the part where all the events go to and originate from. This is the part you'll have to adjust to suit you needs. You can use the script that controls my house as an example to start from. (these core scripts are in handlers.pm)

For example: When you connect a switch to the input of the I/O board and you flip it, the IO module will send an event like "IN3" to the core. The core will then call the approriate "handler" for the event called "IN3", and in this handler you can put your perl code. This code can for example send an event to MPLAYER to start playing some mp3's. Because of this event-based design the possibilities are endless. :)

At this moment the following modules exists:

• K8000 module This is a module that can control the k8000 board from velleman when it's connected to the printer port. With this board you have 16 input/outputs and some analog inputs and outputs. If you want to write your own IO module to controle some hardware you could use this as a starting point. (also read the HOWTO!)
• LIRC module This module translates all events it receives from the LIRC project to nice paus events. This way you can control anything you want by remote control. (It's called IR)
• The universal userinterface This is just a module to buffer user interface data. External userinterface programs can connect to this module and fetch the buffered data and start interacting with the users. (It's called UI) At this moment I only coded the web interface module. Anyone care to help with some nice GTK interfaces? :-) Because the data is buffered, it seems to the core that there's always a userinterface connected, when in fact a userinterface program can connect and disconnect at any time.
• LCDPROC module This will communicate with the LCDPROC daemon so that you can show text on LCD displays. This module doesn't exists yet. (i don't need it yet ;-)
• STDIO module This module just prints all recevied events to STDOUT and translates STDIN to paus events. This way you can communicate with programs that can be controlled by STDIN. Currently I use it to control mplayer to play my mp3's and movies. (look at the "mplayerbox" and "box" scripts) By default it's called "PIPE", but normally you would start it with a more logical name like MP3 or MPLAYER.
• TIMER module This module is to allow you to send events to the core at an specified interval. This is nessecary if you want to "wait" before you do something. You shouldn't use things like sleep() in you scripts because the whole paus system would "hang" during this sleep.
Need any other modules? Read to how-to so that you can learn to make them yourself, or pay me in some way and i'll do it for you.

Performance and real-time properties

I will check this out as soon as I have time again. :-) It would be nice to input a block signal to the K8000 module and let the core relay this to an output again so that we can measure the response time and all kind of other timing properties of the whole system. (Especially over a network)

Who's using it?

I dunno..mail me if you use it or want to use it! I'm using it myself to control my own house and it has never crashed so far! Paus has been running for weeks without any problems. :-)

Currently i'm moving, so the system is disconnected from the internet right now :-(. I will update the site again as soon as I intergrated the system in my new home. (and I will probably make a lot of additions like the LCD part)

Future plans

I also want to build a paus controlled PC in my car. This pc will be my mobile MP3 player. It will also to start my car in the winter so that it's warmed up when I have to go to my work. Besides that it will be my alert system and I will be able to control it with my condor IR watch. (and unlock the doors as well) If this all works I want to write a module to enable paus-cores to connect eachother. This way my car will automaticly connect my house when it's in range. (I will use wireless networking to accomplish this)

So there are plans enough, but there's too little time. :-)

Check the sourceforge page. for more info. (or click one of the link on top of this document)
Edwin Eefting, edwin@lazypeople.net
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