Another popular home automation module is the Xanura CTX15:
That’s a live 220V power-line connection in the top right corner!
I’ve connected the CTX15 module through a UART Plug, with a 4.7 kΩ resistor in series with the RX signal (yellow from CTX15). This is because the signal swings up to 5V, whereas the UART plug only accepts 3.3V voltage levels. The module is powered from the PWR pin, which on a JeeNode USB carries 5V.
The CTX15 is a bi-directional interface, it can send as well as receive A10-type power-line commands (a superset of X10). The trouble is that it needs to be polled to read out what has been received and buffered so far.
Here’s a sketch which takes care of that:
And here’s some sample output:
As a test, I powered up yesterday’s XM10E test setup as well, to send out on and off commands to unit A.1 every 3 seconds. As you can see with the CTX being read out every 5 seconds, multiple received packets will sometimes be combined and returned as one reply.