Arming with CBus

Hi all,

This is my first post on this forum although I have been snooping around for a little while from time to time.
My challange I would appreciate a little help with:

I have recently installed a 5400/16CB, and am still a bit green with CBus and wondered if anyone can help me with the specifics of setting up an " Away Scene" that includes arming the alarm system.

 

I personally just create a group address on the lighting network and using the P151 menu pulse the group address on for 2 seconds when panel is armed. create a second group address for disarming fro say welcome scene.Then in either Ctouch Pac or Scene based switches create a scene (away) and use the trigger group for that scene ie the group address created from the alarm arming P151 setting. to set that sceen every time the group address triggers. I keep the away (armed) and Welcome (disarmed) scenes fairley basic in the amount of group addresses it controls. If you have a colour ctouch create a page that lets the user edit these two scenes ie scene edit. Would be nice to disarm the panel via Cbus applications but hey Christmas is coming again next year.

Regards

 

Scene not triggering armed panel

Has anybody experienced this?:

I have a group address set to arm the homesafe panel. If I set the group address on via toolkit or a simple key switch (DLT With timer on) the panel arms.

However, if I include the group in a scene with the DLT triggering the scene it does not arm.

Strangely I can see the group address turning on in the logs but the panel does not see it. I have tried pulsing, ramping, all the tricks but the panel does not 'see' the group turning on through a scene, it only arms through a straight key assignment to turn on the group.

Any ideas what could cause this, I had contact CIS support but I thought the forum users may have an idea on how to fix this.

 

When you trigger a scene a single cbus message is created that contains multiple group addresses. Some 3rd party devices are unable to handle these type of messages (e.g early Ness M1 panels). I'm not sure about the homesafe panels. You could try just creating another scene with the same trigger group/action selector containing just the arming group address.

 

Thanks Ashley but any scene message that contains a group address to enable the panel doesn't seem to be reliable, even after trying a single scene entry. Sometimes it works and most times it doesn't? then?

I had a bit of an 'best practices' moment anyway and realised that one should trigger an event (or in this case my scene) from the alarm panels broadcast of it being armed/disarmed as this allows for two things to occur:

1) even if the panel is armed via the keypad/wiser widget/etc. the event still executes. (ie. all lights off, doors locked on exit delay, etc) which is what the end user expects when 'arming' the panel, regardless of the method to do so.
2) if the event does not execute then you know the panel wasn't armed/disarmed successfully or the broadcast from the alarm panel wasn't - either way you can easily write some logic to notify the user of this or similar.