Home Automation on Synology NAS

I am the proud owner of a Synology DS209j NAS. This NAS has firmware that allows much more than just storage. While I only wanted one computer on 2/47 in the house. I also wanted a home automation server. Unfortunately, the Synology NAS devices weren't intended to be home automation servers. Therefore, a lot of modification has been required to get it to act as a home automation server. These next few posts have been up in the Synology forum for a while now, but I wanted to add my work to my own blog so please click 'read more' to expand this post...


http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=19788#p81040

I have a Synology DS209j, and I'll always run the latest firmware.

I've installed Xubuntu 9.04 in a virtual machine on my mac.

Following this page:
http://www.synology.com/us/support/3rd-party_application_integration.php

There is a document:
http://download.synology.com/download/ds/userguide/Synology%20NAS%20Server%203rd-Party%20Apps%20Integration%20Guide.pdf

Following the document I've downloaded the latest toolchain from Synology as well as the latest GPL source:
http://www.synology.com/us/gpl/index.php

As far as usb to serial hardware goes, I am using this product from Parallax as it give you proper RS232 levels and is very affordable:
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/768/ProductID/378/Default.aspx

From that page I followed the link to the external FTDI drivers for linux.

I renamed the ftdi_sio header and c file to .orig and placed these new files in their location in the synology source. From their I followed the document and made the modules.



Now i've got usbserial.ko and ftdi_sio.ko somewhere on my DS209j

Now you have to load the modules into the kernel and create the devices:

insmod usbserial.ko
insmod ftdi.ko
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

Also, add some lines like these to /etc/rc.local to make it persistent over reboot:

insmod /volume1/archive/usbserial.ko
insmod /volume1/archive/ftdi_sio.ko
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/usb/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

run the command 'dmesg' and you should see something like this:

usb 1-2.1: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 15
usb 1-2.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
ftdi_sio 1-2.1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232RL
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Number of endpoints 2
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 16384
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 16384
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Setting MaxPacketSize 16384
usb 1-2.1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

The X-10 device I got working for now is known as the Firecracker CM17a, and the HD11A/CM11A 2-way computer interface