C-Bus Ramp Level from PCI

Hi, is there a way for me to retrieve the ramp level from PCI? as I could only get the On/Off status by monitoring the MMI report from PCI.

By the way, does anyone have a similar Philips Pronto module as Qualifi for C-bus light control to share?

 

You can't read the ramp rate from the PCI as such because the PCI does not know the state, level or ramp rate of any group addresses.

What you need to do is to monitor the messages from the PCI and look for the C-Bus Ramp To Level events. In these messages, there is a ramp rate (and a level) for the group address.

 

Means I have to constantly monitor the ramp event from any devices (switches, pronto, touch screen) and retrieve the ramp level and updates it to my Pronto? How if somehow such ramp event monitoring is missed and does that means that the current state would be wrong?

 

The MMI's that occur every 3 seconds (typically) on a C-Bus network are a key ingredient in the state checking and error correction mechanism of C-Bus. They only indicate the on/off state of something on C-Bus, not the absolute level.

There is another type of MMI called a Level MMI that can be sent into the network. Devices will communicate the absolute level of a Group Address into this message. Decoding these messages is more tricky than the simple level MMI. This message needs to be initiated from your device, however it should generally only be used at initialisation time (not polled regularly) as it consumes quite a bit of C-Bus bandwidth.

The way C-Bus devices talk to each other is with C-Bus messages. If you are not going to watch for messages that change the state of things on C-Bus you're going to find it difficult to show meaningful state in your Pronto.