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Peter Andersson
peter@it-slav.net

I've already got a female to worry about. Her name is the Enterprise.
-- Kirk, "The Corbomite Maneuver", stardate 1514.0

Background

I have a long time looked at Telldus Tellstick that can control wall-plug socket recievers and other devices. Finally I got my hands on one that my collegue wanted to sell.

This article will describe how to get it up and running on a x86_64 CentOS 6 box, the procedure would be the same on RHEL or Feodora and similiar on other Linux distributions. Unfortunatly the only distribution that has pre-made packages is Ubuntu so I will describe howto download the source code, compile it and get the amazing Telldus Tellstick up and running.

 

Kudos to Telldus that has understood the power of OpenSource and opened up the device to let third-part  vendors make solutions based on the device.

 

Installation

Install packages needed for the compilation

yum install gcc gcc-c++ autoconf automake cmake

 

Libconfuse is needed: 

wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/libconfuse/libconfuse-2.6-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/libconfuse/libconfuse-devel-2.6-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

 

Install libconfuse:

rpm -Uvh libconfuse-*

warning: libconfuse-2.6-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 6b8d79e6: NOKEY

Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]

   1:libconfuse             ########################################### [ 50%]

   2:libconfuse-devel       ########################################### [100%]

 

 

Download, configure, compile, and install the Tellstick package from Telldus 

wget http://download.telldus.se/TellStick/Software/telldus-core/telldus-core-2.0.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf telldus-core-2.0.4.tar.gz 
cd telldus-core-2.0.4
cmake .
make 
make install
 
make use of new libs in /usr/local/lib
echo /usr/local/lib > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/tellstick.conf
ldconfig
 
Insert the needed module
modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0x1781 product=0x0c30
 
connected the telldus stick and in /var/log/messages you should see:
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: New USB device found, idVendor=1781, idProduct=0c30
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Product: TellStick
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Manufacturer: Telldus
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: SerialNumber: A400gl7J
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: ftdi_sio 1-3.2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Detected FT232RL
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Number of endpoints 2
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
Aug 29 18:50:57 mother kernel: usb 1-3.2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
 
Strange is that the Tellstick uses /dev/tellstick even though the log tells ttyUSB0
 

Configure

I bought #50219 from Kjell&Co the price is approx 15€
 
Add to /etc/tellstick.conf
deviceNode = "/dev/tellstick"
device {
  id = 2
  name = "Example device"
  protocol = "arctech"
  model = "selflearning-switch"
  parameters {
    house = "12345678"
    unit = "2"
  }
}
 
Put the powerswitch in selflearning mode and run:
# tdtool --learn 2
Learning device: 2 Example device - Success
 
Try
# tdtool --on 2
Turning on device 2, Example device - Success
 
and the device turned on and there were light!!
 
 
# tdtool --off 2
And the light is off
 
If you get 
/var/state/telldus-core.conf:1: no such option 'deviceNode'
just remove /var/state/telldus-core.conf with
rm /var/state/telldus-core.conf
It seems like it can be removed without any problem.
 
To annoy your wife/kids/dog or anybody else try
while true ; do tdtool --on 2; tdtool --off 2; done
 
Have fun with your computer controlled powerdevices:-)
 
 

Useful links:

 


2 Responses to “Install Telldus Tellstick on CentOS 6 or RedHat Enterprise Linux 6”

  1. peter Says:

    Update:

    Using telldus-core-2.1.1 instead require

     

    yum install libusb-devel

    wget http://pkgrepo.linuxtech.net/el6/release/x86_64/libftdi-0.20-2.el6.x86_64.rpm

    wget http://pkgrepo.linuxtech.net/el6/release/x86_64/libftdi-devel-0.20-2.el6.x86_64.rpm

    rpm -Uvh libftdi-*

  2. Telldus Tellstick Duo on CentOS 7 | kickass infosec Says:

    […] fine on Ubuntu/Debian, OS X and Windows. People have also documented how to get it to work with CentOS 6. But if you are like me and want to run the latest CentOS version then it is a little bit more […]

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