DALI ballast control over CBUS

Hi
I'm new to DALI and try to dim 20 T5 lamps via DALI
I have a C-bus DALI gateway and OSRAM dim ballasts

1. I don't have a tool to assign addresses to ballasts. Which is the easiest tool to do it?

2. If i assign unit adress only, will it be enough to configure groups in ToolKit? Or i should decide what groups i need and assign it via DALI equipment

3. Dali appears in Toolkit as an aplication. So need to choose it as a secondary application in keyswitch menu. But I can not use scenes for both lighting and dali applications in one switch simultaneously. Am I rigtht?

 

You will need to get hold of a Dali programming interface and software to program address into the ballast before connecting the CBus Dali interface.
Tridonic have some interfaces and software but i cant tell you the latest versions.
I have only one Dali installation but my thought would be that after assigning dali unit address to the ballast that you should also assign a dali group address based on areas you are likely to switch and can then map that to a single CBus group address.
Once you have programmed all the ballasts and connected the CBus Dali interface then in Toolkit you can go to Dali interface and map Dali unit and group address to CBus group address.
I used the lighting application for the Dali fittings.

 

For the moment you will most likely find that if you drop the power to the Dali power supplies that all the lamps will come on.
This may be of some use to you until you have the equipment to program the ballasts.

 

To Clipsal
I don't know if it is possible but if the standard CBus Dali interface were able to be used with some software to program Dali ballasts I think it would be a great feature.

 

dimming new lamps

Hi Razor
Don't forget to run your new T5 lamps at Full Output (not dimmed) for the 1st 100hours. If you do not do this, they will fail early.

 

What will fail laps or ballasts.
I have a dsi tridonic ballast installed

one lamp failed after some time
changing the lamp didn't solve the problem.

 

Dali ballasts used to have a dreadful failure rate, sometimes up to 20% (we have had tridonic out on a couple of occasions changing all balasts on a job! however the last one we did probably about 600 balasts we have only had about 5 failures in 6 months. We are desperate for the Dali gateway to be able to communicate the Em-pro status back to something like Schedule Plus as nearly every tender document we see asks for fully automatic emergency lighting with status reports. Tridonic software is our programming software of choice for the Dali side. We also find it easier to group the Dali ballasts in the Dali software rather than in the clipsal side.

 

its easy to manage the address, groups and scenes even the clipsal gateway can not support directly.
You can get a toolkit from Tridonic or Osram/Siemens to program the DALI ballasts.
I have free DALI software to do that too.

 

the problem is that you can not control dali and cbus scenes from one c-bus switch.

 

Finally
I assigned LIGHTINING as a main aplication for DALI module
everything works OK, even scenes

But there is one more question

After I select a scene to turn off lightning
the halogen lamps ramp to OFF
and dali lamps INSTANTLY TURN OFF

Is it possible for lumniscent DALI lamps to fade out

 

Hi Razor
You should check the scene component.
I have no trouble ramping the DALI fittings off from a scene.

 

Also check that you have 'Match Ramp Rates from C-Bus to DALI' boxes ticked in the Map tab in the config of the DALI gateway.

 

DALI ballasts have their own internal rate of dimming. When C-Bus sends a level and a rate to DALI the rate is ignored.

As DarylMc says, you need to turn on the 'Match Ramp Rates from C-Bus to DALI' option in the DALI gateway to override this behaviour of the ballasts.