Getting Started With Home Automation Lighting Control (Part 2)

Chris Lanier has the second part of this excellent article on getting some basic home automation going with, of course, a Media Center PC as the controller. It's pretty slick.

For the software side I will be using Media Center to do everything (naturally), and mControl from Embedded Automation is my plug-in of choice.  I’ve got a copy from Embedded Automation to play with, but as you have seen in Part 1 in my review, you can get the PowerLinc USB Controller with mControl which is the suggestion method since you will need the PowerLinc Controller anyway.

He goes on to say that mControl is quite easy to setup:

Setting up mControl wasn’t much harder than launching Media Center with my remote.  After the basic install wizard of mControl I just launched Media Center and selected mControl from More Programs.  I went ahead and added a zone, in my case I named it “Bedroom.  I then selected the Bedroom zone, and went to “Add Device”.

The nitty-gritty can be found here.