CBUS network being intermittently flooded with strange traffic

disconnect the colour touch screen from the network and monitor to see if the strange traffic still occurs , i have encountered this strange traffic problem on some of my installs and found the colour touch screen to be the culprit . ripped out the touch screen and replaced with a wiser2 and stuck an ipad on the wall where the tc used to be .

 

Just throwing in my 2c worth, if you have a colour touch screen on the network and it has a flat cmos battery, it won't be keeping the correct time/date, this will cause problems with scenes.

 

I haven't been able to solve my issue. It is very intermittent though.
For instance it was playing up very badly about 2 weeks ago to the extent you couldn't use any of the switches sometimes (The indicators just flashed when you pressed the button and none of the PIRs worked). Since this time last week it has not faulted.
I have tried removing the Colour and B&W touch screens as well as the CBUS Audio but it makes little difference except that the touch screens are no longer in circuit to randomly turn on loads they think should be turned on. When the touch screens are in circuit and the network is playing up, sometimes a message comes up on the screen saying network communications has an error.
I have been gradually pulling devices from the wall and re-terminating each which seems to make the network a little more stable.
I fixed a big mess in the switchboard where the pink cables came in. The original installer obviously had no idea how to terminate the cable to an RJ45 to plug into the relays and dimmer units. There were three CBUS pink cables coming from the house into the switchboard. So they cut a patch cord in half then joined the cables with some screw terminal connectors and wrapped the whole thing in electrical tape. It looked REALLY ugly and when I unwrapped it, the screw terminals had been tightened so much it had broken the single strands of some of the conductors. I re-terminated into a pair of surface mount IDC sockets and then plugged cbus patch cords from there to the first relay and last relay putting the active units more "in the centre" of the network. This made a big difference and has me thinking that similar other bodgy connections are somewhere else in my network.

 

The flat CMOS battery is interesting. I might go check my devices and see if they have good batteries. They are nearly 10 years old so they are probably cactus.
I don't remember seeing a battery on the colour or B&W screen though.

 

Almost certainly flat cmos battery after 10 years.
I recently changed the battery on a CTC2 since the clock would not hold time after a power cycle so that’s an easy way to check.
Shortly after that the CTC2 was having some trouble communicating to the CBus network and was sent for repairs.
This is a common repair for the CTC2.
It is still working well as far as I know.

 

Hi DarylMc,

Do you know if the MRA matrix switchers are likely to have a cmos battery as well?
I haven't had my MRA gear connected to the CBUS network while the network has been playing up because amplifiers would randomly turn themselves on which was not good in the middle of the night. However the matrix switcher is still powered up in the rack, and I noticed that it is doing a strange "reboot" type thing where it keeps the backlight on the display turned on and alternates between showing the IP address screen and the MRA startup screen (the backlight turns off briefly as it switches between the two). It is programmed to only have the backlight turn on when you press a button. I'm not sure if that is because it has no CBUS network currently plugged in or maybe it has lost it's programming.

 

Hello Anthony
I have no experience with the MRA equipment.

As Nick D said "To me the symptoms you describe still seem like an underlying communications problem... it could be a faulty unit, a faulty power supply, or an intermittent bad connection or water ingress or something like that."
Did you get the Touch screen fixed?
If it is approaching 10 years old the cmos battery will be flat and most likely has a failed capacitor causing problems on the CBus network interface.

 

I haven't pulled the touch screen out yet to have a look. I'll have a look at the capacitors while I am at it.

The network issues have subsided substantially since I re-terminated the connections in the switchboard. They still happen now but not as frequently. I am slowly but surely pulling switches and PIRs and re-terminating them as I get time. I'm amazed it took 8 years for me to start seeing issues with the network after seeing how bad the original terminations were done!

I am also starting to suspect some of the light bulbs in the house. Over the last 10 years more and more bulbs have been replaced with LEDs. The problem is that it is now getting hard to buy conventional bulbs, and since I have 32 of the light circuits on dimmers (4 x 8 way dimmer modules), some now have LED bulbs in them. The bulbs are supposedly dimmable, and in fact do dim ok, but I'm wondering if there is electrical noise being conducted back to the dimmer units. I know the power supplies in the dimmer units are not as isolated as the relay units because the dimmer power supply must be on the same phase as the loads so the dimming can be done in the correct part of the 50Hz waveform.