EventGhost

Pako -- thanks for the reply.

I was holding off on responding until I learned a bit more about Python and EG (I've hacked around with C and Perl before, but I'm certainly no programmer at such low levels -- even in such high-level languages).

And I really appreciate you posting the code that you ...

Thanks, both of you, for the suggestions -- reading through all that got the wheels turning the right direction. Every situation is different, so for me (and for now) I wound up using SchedulGhost's Egg Timer functionality and five unique soft buttons on a screen in my Harmony to select a sleep ...

Seconded on not all adapters being created equal.

A bog-standard, cheap USB-RS-232 adapter outputs 0v-5v (TTL) signalling, while "proper" RS-232 uses something like -12V-+12V signalling to get the bits across.

Many things that are "RS-232" devices are perfectly happy with lower-voltage TTL ...

So I was dozing off on my couch the other day listening to the sound of the electric meter spinning and watching a documentary, and thought: "Wouldn't it be great if I could just turn all this stuff off automatically?"

I thought about microcontrollers, I thought about old-school learning remotes ...