Product Reviews

A fully automated home, controlled through your PC, might seem like a far-fetched fantasy reserved for the ultra rich or a science-fiction novel, but Simply Automate's Domio Starter Kit can get you going for ̀135. The kit comes with two plug-in dimmer modules, into which you plug standard lamps, Harmony control software, a Media Center software plug-in and a USB X10 interface, which sends commands from your PC to your devices.

For a kit aimed at making home automation simple, it's not as easy as it should be and Harmony is only a trial version. You have to register it to get a full product key, sent via email.

Harmony is a very powerful application, but not particularly easy to use. The interface is a touch confusing and poorly laid out. Its first job is to import your devices. This is a manual process, which involves entering the details of your home automation devices including choosing a unique address and selecting the type, such as Plug-in Dimmer, from a drop-down list. An automatic detection routine or a simple wizard would

Once we'd connected our dimmer switches, we could remotely turn our lamps on and off, and dim them. This doesn't always work properly, though. If you turn a partly dimmed light off and then back on, Harmony tells you it's at full brightness, whereas the lamp is actually at its previous level.

Harmony isn't just about direct control, and you can automate events, such as what time your lamps come on. You can even group together lamps into a preset scene, which sets your lamps to a preconfigured state. These options highlight the problem with the Starter Kit: there's not enough variety. The full range of supported products includes temperature sensors, motion detectors, alarms, remote controls, appliance switches and a host of other things. Using all these together you can do pretty much anything you want, such as setting your lamps in your dining room to a lower level and switching on the stereo when you have guests, or turning on lights in the bathroom when someone walks in. The range of options is staggering, but the Starter Kit doesn't come close to showing the system's full power.

This kit also comes with a Windows Media Center interface, which lets you use the system to control your devices. However, it can only activate commands, scenes and actions that you've configured in Harmony, so you still need to do all the difficult work first.

The Domio Starter Kit works well and the range of things that you can do with Harmony is very impressive. However, the kit is too limited in its scope and you'll have to spend more money buying other devices to enjoy its full flexibility.