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Setting Up a Zone and Device
After installing mControl, you should see a new icon for mControl in the More Programs section of your Media Center interface, as shown in Figure 3.
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Figure 3 The mControl icon in the More Programs section of Windows Media Center.
Go ahead and choose the mControl icon, using your Windows Media Center remote. When you launch mControl for the first time, you’ll get a Settings option, as shown in Figure 4. Go ahead and choose this option.
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Figure 4 The Settings option of mControl.
mControl works by placing devices into "zones." A zone is simply a user-defined collection of devices. For example, if you have mControl controlling multiple devices, you might have devices located in your living room in a zone you name "Living room" and devices located in a your bedroom in a zone named "Bedroom." For simplicity in this article, we’ll deal with only one zone and one device. Go ahead and choose the Manage Zones option using your remote, as shown in Figure 5. Next, choose the Add Zone option shown in Figure 6.
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Figure 5 Click the Manage Zones button.
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Figure 6 Click the Add Zone button.
Next, enter a name for your zone by either using your Media Center remote or by using your computer keyboard. As Figure 7 shows, I called my zone Home.
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Figure 7 Creating a zone called Home.
After creating your zone, choose the zone and use the remote to navigate to the Add Device zone (see Figure 8).
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Figure 8 Click the Add Device button.
At this point, we’re ready to "teach" mControl how to talk to the lamp module we plugged in earlier. In the Add Device screen’s main window (shown in Figure 9), name your device Lamp and choose the adapter CM17A-X10. Select a port of COM1 and a module of LM465. Specify a House code of A and a Unit number of 2. Choose an image for your device, using the menu. (Since we’re controlling a lamp, choose the lamp image.) Notice that the options we’ve provided correspond to the physical setup we performed earlier.
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Figure 9 Adding the lamp device.
On the Advanced screen, you can specify a dim increment/decrement setting. By default, this level is 10% (see Figure 10).
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Figure 10 Setting advanced device features.
To have mControl remember the settings you just entered, go back to the main mControl screen and click the Save Changes button (see Figure 11).
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Figure 11 Saving changes to mControl.