I am looking for a way to display the status of a driveway gate at the house using the 115V line that power's the gate. The status being opened, closed or in transition. I thought the X10 protocol used for home automation products would be a good method if I could find an X10 transceiver the would work over a power line and interface with one of the programmable controllers like Arduino. Does anyone know of such a transceiver or where I might find information on building such a device? I know there are RF transceivers in the X10 module set that but I do not think RF transmission would be that reliable over the distance required.
It looks to me like the X10 protocol does support the transmission of small amounts of data but I have been unable to find a generic transceiver that can be used to xmit and receive data over a power line line. Everything seems to be oriented towards controlling lights, appliances, etc.
The concept might be:
- A programmable control;er at the gate that would sense the position of the gate and build a status byte.
- The controller would send the byte down the power line using the X10 transceiver module to the house.
- In the house there would be another programmable module that would received the status byte through another X10 transceiver plugged into a convenient outlet and make it available to a second programmable controller that would interpret the status byte and light the appropriate LEDs, red, yellow or green.
