Already out-of-town and forgot to put the house in vacation mode? Want to warm up the hot tub from your mobile phone before you get home? Need to make sure you turned on the security flood lights while away from home?

With Ovolab’s Phlink and Indigo you can do all this, and much more, over any touch tone phone using our intuitive menu-driven Indigo Phlink scripts. The intuitive speech synthesized menu system lets you:

• Execute Indigo Action Groups (lighting scenes, house modes, etc.)
• Hear the on/off status of Devices
• Hear the brightness level of lamp and light modules
• Turn on or off any Device
• Brighten or dim lamp and light modules

You can even use Indigo and Phlink to call your mobile or office phone to remotely notify you of emergencies, such as motion detected alarms, power failures, or pipes freezing.

Ovolab Phlink (and the Ovolab Telephone Adapter) automatically answers telephone calls and identifies the caller using Caller ID. Not only does Phlink then record the call onto your Mac like an answering machine, but it can also listen to touch tone key sequences that are pressed.

The Indigo Phlink scripts process these touch tone key sequences and communicate with Indigo to dynamically build and speak (using speech synthesis) a menu based on your home control setup. Indigo, using X10 technology, then controls lights, appliances, and much more, throughout your house.

Sound complicated? We have made it easy! Once you have Phlink and Indigo just install the scripts below. Then, from within Indigo you can use the option Display in remote UI (available inside the Action Group and Device dialogs) to specify which Action Groups and Devices should be available over the telephone.

To remotely control your home over the phone you will need:

• Ovolab’s Phlink with Telephone Adapter
• Indigo software with PowerLinc USB and X10 modules
  (30 day trial copy download available)
• Indigo Phlink scripts download

Copy the phlink call out attachment.scpt file into your Indigo Attachments folder. This attachment script defines two AppleScript functions, MakeEmergencyCallToNumber() and MakeEmergencyCall(), which can be called from any Indigo Trigger or Time/Date Action to automatically have Phlink call your mobile or office phone in an emergency.

Next, copy the Indigo Phlink scripts into your Phlink Items folder. If you are already using other Phlink scripts, then you can put all of the Indigo scripts into a sub-folder. These scripts automatically build and handle the speech synthesized menu system for controlling Indigo remotely over any touch tone phone.

You probably will not want to give everyone that calls control over your lights and hot tub. To restrict access to the Indigo Phlink scripts you can create a touch tone sequence password by placing the scripts in a sub-folder whose title is a long sequence of numbers only you know. Alternatively, you can restrict the access to the scripts by giving them a suffix of the caller ID from which you will be calling.

The scripts are editable with the Script Editor application included with the OS. Using basic AppleScript you can easily add options to have Phlink speak an Indigo variable value, for example, the temperature of a thermostat, or you could check the last time a motion detector was triggered. For help extending the Indigo Phlink integration for your own needs, join us on the Indigo AppleScript forum.

For a complete step-by-step tutorial on using Indigo and Phlink, read this excerpt from the Smart Home Hacks book.