[Coco] further adventures with plug'n'power/x10

[Aaron Wolfe]

The x10 outlets I ordered finally showed up, so I tried some things
with the CoCo today.

First I found that the x10 software on RTSI is indeed for controlling
things with a serial port based X10 controller.. so doesn't seem to be
useful for working with the cassette port based Plug'N'Power
controllers.

The disk the Bruce posted has a DECB utility and os9 assembler source
for a tool to send X10 on/off/dim/bright/etc commands using the
cassette based controllers.  Would be perfect if it worked...  but it
doesn't work for me.  I have a lot of unknowns here and could use any
ideas to troubleshoot things.

With the PNP controller connected to the coco, it's Data light comes
on briefly at power on and then goes off.  If I run the DECB program,
the first command sent causes the data light to flash and then it
stays on until I remove power.  Sending additional commands will cause
the data light to flash and then return to on.

I assembled the OS9 tool (which is what I'd prefer to use in the end)
and it appears to run fine under nitros9.  It behaves much like the
DECB program, except that the data light turns back off after the
command is sent.  So it's off, I send a command and it flashes a bit,
and then its back off.  This seems likely to be what should be
happening, but I'm just guessing.

Well.. I know that something is happening on the cassette port since
the data light shows activity when a command is sent.  However,
nothing happens on either outlet that I have connected.  I'm not sure
how to troubleshoot further.

My outlets could be bad.. the pnp controller might be bad.. but I'm
thinking there might be a simpler explanation.  The test coco is a
coco 3 with a 6309 running nitros9 l2 (or just DECB).  One interesting
thing I've noticed is that the data light on the pnp controller
flashes dimly in response to activity on the bitbanger.  I'm using
DriveWire and I can watch the light dimly flash in response to the
regular poll cycle or whenever disk activity occurs over the
bitbanger.  Could this be interfering somehow?  I tried disabling the
poll and loading the pnp command into ram so nothing would be occuring
on the bitbanger while sending the PNP command via the cassette port,
but it made no difference.

Thanks for any ideas on what to try next.
-Aaron