multiple colour touchscreens

Looking for some advice on the best way to use two or more colour touchscreens on a network.

As I understand it one ctouch should run the schedules/scenes/logic and the other is just a trigger/monitoring screen.

Two scenarios where this may not be the best option arise....

1. Where the logic operation is critical and the second screen needs to act as a back up to the other. I can see ways around this for example using dummy group addresses to communicate a heartbeat status between the two screens and using this to allow logic to run or not. Is this the best way though?

2. Where a single screen doesnt have the capacity to handle everything. I would imagine tasks could be split between several screens as long as the areas controlled were only dealt with by one screen. eg. screen a controls heating and screen b controls lighting with only triggers and monitoring for the items they don't control.

In both cases above this complicates the logic but I guess the same programs could be used in both screens with a flag to disable certain parts in one screen and enable them in the other and vice versa.

Any thoughts or advice on this would be appreciated.

Thanks
Mick

 

Hi,

Yes, this is a bit of an issue.

However, remember, that we should make implementation as easy as possible for our own sake.

All your Ideas are good, But I would stick to One Screen being the workhorse, and the others as triggers.

I have learnt this by trying to divide RS232 control between a PAC and a HomeGate machine. Its the same principal, both have a logic engine etc...

The issues I found:-
-Hard to track the Logic code over two devices, and how a change on one device effects the other.
-The limitation of Group Address being the only global variable across these devices. Let me expand on this. When you get to writing some real funky code with all the tools you have available, you actually can't share that amongst the devices, e.g. SystemIO variables. So you are then relying on Group Address, this puts more stress on the C-Bus network.

So I am sticking to a Master Slave setup.

But, I'd like to hear from the sceniors.

 

We are planning to fully support redundancy between units in the future. You will be able to put the full project into several units or spread one project across several units and it will all work seamlessly. There is a lot of work for us to make this happen, so don't count on seeing it soon.

 

Like that idea, whens it coming

 

We can't give dates for product releases.