I took delivery of my Active Home X10 starter kit yesterday. The kit is the 7 peice version that includes the Computer interface, appliance outlet, lamp outlets, bayonet fitting, radio receiver and remote control.

As I already have the mControl demo installed on my laptop I decided to try and get control of at least one light. I fitted the bayonet adaptor into my hallway light and then plugged the radio receiver into a socket outlet. Using the remote I could easily trigger the appliance adaptor built into the radio receiver; by pressing '1' and then 'on' I heard a satisfactory click as the relay clicked on and off, however pressing '2' and then 'on' did not switch the light on as expected - that is until I realised I needed to obviously leave the light switch in the on position - D'OH!

In less that 5 minutes I had a working system - I could now turn the hall light on and off from anywhere in the house and garden (for what pupose I'm not really sure). The range on the remote control seems very good - I now have it plugged in at one one of the house and can use the remote from the other with no problems.

So now for the tricky part - getting it to work from my PC. I put the batteries in the pc adaptor and plugged it in, I then run the comms cable from the adapator to the comm port on my laptop (the unit I received is the serial version - a USB version is also available).

With the connections done I opened up the mControl demo. I created a zone for the Hallway and added an LM14 device as it did not have an LM15 calling it Hall Light. After I saved it I clicked on the button to turn the lamp on and hey presto - the light went on!!!

So far so good - this only leaves one thing left to test - My JasJam smart phone.

I have a static IP address as I host some web sites on a home server which is great for accessing computers whilst i'm away from home. Its also possible to use some kind of service if you have a dynamically assigned address that allows you connect to your home server, but I haven't used this before.

Before I could use the remote interface I created a rule on my firewall to pass port 29990 through to the IP address of my laptop, I then navigated my JasJam's broswser to http://myipaddress:29990/mobile.aspx

I was pleasantly surprised to see the zone I had created with the hallway light in my browser, I could easily turn the light on and off with a surpringly quick reaction time of only a second or two.

mControl rocks!!! - it worked right 'out of the box' with no fancy configuration required, the mobile remote access is also great - not only is it included with the package its easy to use and has well thought out controls for the small mobile screen.

I am more than happy with the whole system (well - based on installing one light I am - lol) its easy to setup, use and the mControl software is worth every penny. I must admit I didn't even load up the software that came with the product - perhaps this is all you may require but if your're a Media Centre user I definately reccomend mControl for the integration into the MCE interface.

The browser based access is also great - I tried this on a small 8" touchscreen which will be the permanent access point for the whole home automation system, the layout of the mControl interface works great at this size.

All I now need is for the rest of my X10 parts and the Micro PC to turn up