B&W Touchscreen - Edit Schedules & Sunrise / Sunset

Hi all - some advice please about the internal "Edit Schedules" function of the B&W T/S.

I'm creating a series of new schedules for re-programming of an already installed unit - unfortunately I don't have one here to refer to. Also, I have never physically seen a B&W C-touch running firmware over v1.9... hence this post.

The particular Commercial site is completely run by the B&W Ctouch, and all of it on schedules. There are no key inputs at all and almost no need of manual over-rides. The problem has been that the originally created schedules aren't working well, so I am re-doing the whole thing from scratch.

Previously everything was scheduled to specific times, and these are very complex, due to varying sunset times. A lot of the events could be made to be Sunset-based, which saves a considerable amount of programming for Autumn/Winter/Spring/Summer type duplicated schedules.

In PICED I can easily program the B&W with special schedules that create Sunrise and Sunset "events", and then create shedules based on an offset from those (internally calculated) times. My questions are about hows the internal Schedule Editor handles these kind of schedules. In the User Manual page 16 it shows the schedule editing menus, but not all of the screens are detailed fully.

Let's say I have a Schedule which runs at Sunset minus 1 hr offset...

1. What is shown for the (action) "Time" on the Ctouch screens - is this adjusted dependant on the calculated senset time? For example, if sunset was at 19.00 today, will it show 19.00 or 18.00 (including the offset), or some other value? Can the User verify when that particular schedule will "actually" happen?

2. Does the user have the ability to adjust the Time Offset (from Sunset). Eg: change it from sunset minus 1hr to sunset minus 2hrs ?

3. Can a User change a schedule from a "Sunset-based" to a strictly "Time-based" event? So, if they don't like the calculated times can they change it back to a plain old time-based scheduling - just using the Edit Schedules on the screen, rather than re-programming with PICED ?

4. Say Schedule 1 only operates from Jan to March, to be replaced by Schedule 2 from Apr to July... How are those shown on the "Select Schedules" screen? Are they both listed there although only one is actually "active" during March?
- the reason I ask is that the listings show the Time of the Schedule, but don't seem to show much more... in firmware 1.9 you need to drill right down into "days", "months", menus to find out if the schedule always runs, or is only active on certain days.

********************

Sorry for all the questions, but I couldn't find anywhere that these kind of "in-depth" details are listed / described.

Thanks again, John

 

G'day John

This is all from memory, but they're fairly recent memories so it should help a bit I hope!

You will just see "Sunset +1 hr" or "Sunrise -3hrs"....no actual times.

Yeah, that's all you can do I believe...which leads to...

...I'm quite sure you need to re-program with PICED. Bit of a bummer but usually when something is sunset/sunrise based it will stay that way. Not all jobs are "usual" though, hey

It's the same as the way you describe for firmware 1.9. You'll see both schedules in the list, but they'll show as 'Enabled' or 'Disabled' depending on the time of year or what not. You then need to drill down to get the details.

Hopefully I haven't told any untruths there and it helps you out!

Cheers

Matt

 

Thanks Matt - if it's all true then that is GREAT news. One more question...

The existing install uses v1.9 Firmware, programmed with old C-touch software. On the "Edit Schedules" page you only see a listing of "Schedule 1", "Schedule 2" etc... a list of 30 in this case, but with no indication of what one does what !

I checked the C-touch software, and those schedules each had a name assigned, but those names aren't shown on the screen itself. Reprogramming in PICED, I just saved a scene and it prompted me that the name was too long, and advised me of the shortened text that would be downloaded to the screen...

Does that mean that the new Firmware allows the screen to display a meaningful Schedule Name? And similarly, does it also show the Scene Names too?
- If yes, then I am going to save a LOT of documentation time

Thanks again for the help, John

 

Yep, the Scene & Schedule names appear on the edit pages. So, in the situation where you have schedules for, say, March to July and then June to December etc you can give them meaningful names so it makes things a bit easier for the user.

You're still limited by how long the name is but, as you say, PICED does tell you when the names are too long.

 

Oh, one word of warning...

...the scenes and schedules appear on the touch screen in the order you see them in the PICED editor so it's a good idea to try and arrange them in a logical order there. And the slight bugger with the schedules is you can't move them up and down once you've created them.

It's not a BIG drama, but it's nice to have some sort of order to make the screen as intuitive to use as possible.