Solved: Freaky slinke behavior

Some of you may have seen posts where I talked about the slinke freaking out, and generally refusing to work. I was thinking it was my new aquarium lighting creating electrical noise, since the X10 system in my house was also randomly turning lights on and off (and especially all lights on, in the middle of the day... though it also liked turning all lights off in the evening).

Well, I got a noise filter for the lights (www.smarthome.com), and the x10 went back to normal, but the slinke was still acting weird.

The really weird thing was that if I walked up to it and fiddled with it, it would start working. I finally figured it out: IR noise.

Yep, the aquarium lights emit enough IR to make the slinke swamp the slink bus with data (the "activity" light goes on solid). Normal remotes and everything worked fine, but then they're looking for specific bit patterns and not sending everything over a fairly slow wire for decoding.

The answer: for now, I've electrical taped over the IR receiver on the slinke, and everything works. I'd like to find a solution that would still let me use IR remotes with it, but that may not be possible in the same room with the aquarium lighting on.

Just wanted to document it so future people can search on it.