Thinking Home Support

There are several ways of getting support for Thinking Home and answers to your home automation questions. This page describes a few.

The most common problem reported is that the X-10 serial port is not found on Mac OS X. This is due to undesired default behavior of Network preferences and is easily solved.

You want to make your X-10 serial port unavailable for networking so it will become available for X-10. Go to System Preferences, select Network, then Show: Network Port Configurations. Uncheck your serial port and drag it to the bottom of the list, after any real modems. You don’t want the OS even peeking at the port, asking modem-like questions to an X-10 interface that can get confused by the unexpected data.

If this makes the port found and the interface is not responding, it is probably confused and needs all power removed for 15 minutes.

These steps will get you back in operation again.

Apple Help for Thinking Home

Apple Help for Thinking Home provides useful information about using the software as well as links for related information such as third party hardware vendors, periodicals and internet resources. For starters, there is a tutorial walkthrough that takes you through the essential steps, one by one. To assist in troubleshooting, many of the more common alerts and windows contain a button that looks like this

and pressing the button will lead to the portion of the Apple Help describing the particular topic in more detail, often giving suggestions.

Apple Help for Thinking Home is also available by pressing the Help key on the keyboard or from the Help menu.

Mailing List
We have a mailing list where users can discuss their experiences with Thinking Home and we can also answer questions. In addition, we will always announce important information such as releases of bug fixes and similar matters. Click here to sign up.

For general X-10 home automation questions and troubleshooting, there is a wealth of information in the comp.home.automation newsgroup and it is easier to access than you might think. For those without a news reader, you can use a web browser at groups.google.com.

Sherlock
For a really fast search of the newsgroup , try our Sherlock plug-in made just for comp.home.automation. It searches the newsgroup for as many as 100 matches. You can almost always find your answer this way. For example, your devices are no longer responding to your FireCracker or hand-held remotes and you suspect that the transceiver may not be working. You look on the transceiver and see that it is model RR-501. Then use our Sherlock plug-in to search for "RR-501" and find that others have seen this before and have found a solution.

If the plug-in download did not expand on its own, you may need to get Stuffit Expander.