House off via RS232

Hi guys,

I want to achieve a house off via the RS232 interface.

I only have dimmers in my system (about 17 of them) and they are all for the house.

Is there an easy way to achieve this?

Sorry for the noddy question.

Chris

 

1.If the master overrides have been fully connected you could use an RS232 controlled relay to trigger the master off.
2. You could install a Bus Coupler or General Input unit and triigger it via an RS232 controlled relay.
3. Best of all, you could install a serial interface (PCI) which would give you full RS232 control of the whole system.

 

Thanks - I do have a PCI - the rs232 will be coming from a Crestron controller

I am guessing I should use area codes for the dinners with a ramp off or similar to achieve this? I did look in the manuals but couldn’t see anything on this.

Chris

 

The area code is the simplest solution assuming you want to control all channels on the dimmer.

 

The area works, but in my experience the network does not update the status of each group correctly. Try this an see how you go.

If using Crestron, then you could just issue a command to every light sequentially to do the same thing. That's what I do now with CQC. Have to be careful that I don't pump too many commands onto the bus too quickly so I built in a delay between each command.

Does Crestron have any macro capabilities that would allow this to be done in code. I read all groups assigned to the C-Bus driver, compare it to a list of lights to ignore and then ramp them to 0 over x seconds if they are not to be ignored.

 

Area ga's should work fine on a single network system although they can take several seconds to update the input unit status. They are of limited use on multiple networks as the bridges don't pass MMI messages. That being said their use was deprecated some time ago and scenes are now the preferred option. I'm not familiar with the capabilities of the Comfort/Cbus integration so in this simple case a single area ga seemed the simplest solution.

In my experience 3rd party devices rarely implement concatenated cbus commands so issuing large scenes can be a problem unless you insert delays which just adds to the complexity.