X10 Overview

I have been playing with the CM11 myself, and in my experience it's too unreliable to be using it for anything serious. My unqualified guess is that the unit itself is flawed by design, and not worth spending a lot of time on (I know I did). I even bought two CM11, as I was sure the first one I tried was broken. It turned out the same thing happened to the second one.
The problem was that every now an then the unit locks up, and doesn't respond to any commands. When I did the testing on the unit, I was happy when finally it seemed stable enough to send out several thousand on/off commands in a row without any crash. I didn't have any devices responding to the commands, though, as turning the lights on and off every few secons would turn me crazy before the first couple of hundreds commands. I even tested with a device responding to the command - but with no light connected to it with great success.
However, when I was happy with the stability of the CM11, I tried to use it for actually turning on and off lights - and it would lock up within a few transmissions. To make it lock up quite fast; this is the setup I used: Connect an appliance module next to the cm11a. Make a test that sends on/off commands with a few seconds delay. This setup worked great, and a could pump out 10s of commands in a row without any faults. Then I connected a 60W light bulb to the appliance module, and within 10 transmissions the CM11 would lock up.
So it seems to me the CM11 is very sensitive to variations on the power line - responding with a total lockup if there's too much noise or whatever. The only remedy to make it work was to disconnect the CM11 from the power line and reboot the computer (as it seemed the serial connection to the computer would be messed up as well).
Personally I wouldn't bother with trying to get the CM11 to work, as I believe no software patch can work around the problem that the CM11 will lock up sooner or later if you actually try to use it to turn on and off lights and appliances. This is my experience - tested in my home in norway - I did not test different locations - but I believe I do not have a unique electrical system in my apartment - so I believe that the CM11 is by design so flawed that it is not worth investing time in. At least you should try to see how stable it it when turning on and off actual load close to the CM11 on the powerline - if it is further away, the lockups occur more rarely (but they do).
I've since moved to the CTX35 controller - which seemed to be rock solid (but a little more expensive). I've started making an java API for it using rxtx, but I've kind of haven't had the time to finish it, so the code has been "in the drawer" for some time. I'll see if I can finish it and publish the API some time - I just need to get fired from my job or get more spare time somehow.