Introduction The Digital Butler will allow the user to control commercially available X10 products through a menu system either from a webpage or from an on-board LCD screen and keypad. The menu software will be dynamic in nature enabling the user to change the state of individual outlets (e.g. turn on, turn off, and dim), schedule wall outlet events, create lighting configurations, and receive status from the individual outlet units. The control console will receive inputs through wires to a keypad and from a webpage through an Ethernet connection. Based on the input, the console will send an X10 command to the X10 interface, display information on the LCD screen, update HTML files (for a web page), and dynamically allocate memory to adapt the system to the latest user needs. Theory of Operation -Keypad The keypad is a 3x4 matrix of switches (12 buttons total) that, when pressed, connects a unique pair of pins to create a short[5]. There are four column pins and three row pins. The connection takes place between one column and one row. To detect when a button is pressed, the keypad is connected to an MM74C922 keypad encoder [6]. The encoder polls each row at the rising edge of the clock that is set by the rabbit microcontroller. If a button is pressed the chip provides a four bit key-code for output and sets the ‘data available’ pin high. ‘Data available’ is only set after bounce elimination. The keypad encoder requires 5V supply voltage and 5 microcontroller port pins. Software in the microcontroller handles input to the microcontroller from the keypad decoder. -LCD Screen The Crystalfontz CFAG160160BYYHVU Graphic LCD Screen [4] has an on- board controller which communicates with the microcontroller. The LCD controller provides a text mode (as opposed to graphic mode) that displays information. Data from the microcontroller is transmitted to the LCD screen buffer at a rate determined by the ‘LCDReadStatus’ flag from the LCD controller chip. The transfer is through 8 parallel
