New home with cbus and need advice pls

Hi all, I have a home with cbus and an old touchcreen panel. There is controllers in either panel allowing management of the system. I have a new bathroom lights/fans installed (by electrician) and now need to program them - and replace my old touch screen panel.

Advise if I should get a 5500AC2 or Wiser2 installed? I am reasonably technical but interested in the communities preference.

Thanks,
John.

 

Hi, the Wiser AC2 is Clipsal best current version (although 3rd party design), but a bitch programming wise imho. If you simply want a touch screen replacement, scheduling and what/if programming consider the Clipsal Smart Logic Wiser2 unit .... Provides excellent screen output via HDMI and any android tablet will operate as a touch screen interface through their app. It is an elegant solution especially since it can POE powered and provides network/wifi connectivity. System will support multiple tablet touchscreens incidentally plus both apple & android phone support. Btw fully supports HTML5 on browsers and will work straight from the box with minimal setup. D

 

agree with drew if you are a newb then definitely the wiser as its logic engine is simple and uses pascal
it has a scheduler, scene manager, and native phone apps

 

My Wiser 2 has died and I'm wrestling with the AC2, definitely not as easy to use

 

I had a C-Touch that died years back, which ran most of my extensive Pascal logic. I went the AC (AC2) route, and hit one massively steep learning curve, both with visualisations and also LUA. But years later I am delighted with the decision. (And somewhat lighter of pocket. An iPad on the wall in a special bracket/power solution to fill an empty plasterboard hole, etc, etc.)

But I am ultimately delighted with the decision. I can do things with the AC set up that were simply not possible before, including native HomeAssistant via MQTT, Philips Hue, and much more integration. And the speed of these devices is light years ahead of the old C-Touch devices.

Wiser2 wasn't a thing when I had to decide back in 2018, but now I'm glad it wasn't, given I'm an advanced user. It ultimately got rid of a network interface, a CGate installation, a Linux virtual machine and a pile of bolts-hanging-out-of-its-neck problems waiting to happen... I love it. Now.

 

Thanks ssaunders, gives me conform it's flexible!

I find creating scenes, setting timers, creating the web interfaces are chore on the AC2. With the integrations, do you use HomeAssistant to this?

Do you mind giving more detail on your set up?

 

Most everything scheduled is done on the NAC. I have eight simple schedules to do things like trigger all off at sunrise, towel rails, electric blankets off, DLT switch dimming based on time of day. Plus many LUA scheduled scripts (pool filter / top up, irrigation trigger, get weather from a Web API to put in user params, and more).

All scenes are on the NAC, plus old-school distributed and triggered on some other CBus devices. No scenes or schedules in HomeAssistant.

Resident scripts do MQTT for HomeAssistant and Philips Hue integration (https://github.com/autoSteve/acMqtt). The MQTT set-up allows discovery of all CBus devices by HomeAssistant automagically. Other residents do things like dynamic light levels for PIR triggers (https://github.com/autoSteve/dPIR), irrigation, pool and more.

Extensive NAC visualisations are only for an iPad on the wall that replaced the C-Touch hole, but I don't use those for mobile phone (I could). Phone uses HomeAssistant interface. I do often use both, especially as the iPad is in a well lived area.

Reverse proxy cluster running elsewhere gets the traffic in from the Internet for phone connectivity to HomeAssistant. Nabu Casa is used for Google Assistant integration with everything via HomeAssistant, so Google can control everything (feels a bit Skynet at times, but no known intrusions so far).

CCTV cameras (Hikvision to Synology) are streamable using RTSP from HomeAssistant.

My Philips Hue use is restricted to a few handy devices. Electric blankets with smart switches, bedside lights, which are hard to do with CBus, and other oddities where a WiFi smart switch makes a lot of sense.

 

So I started off with a Wiser 2, then one day on good old e-bay, a SHAC came on the market which I bid on and won. I have enjoyed the learning curve and now have SONOS, Google Home (homebridge), Fronius (modbus), Heat pump (HTTP API) and my room thermostats (HTTP API) all linked in.

I use Visio to generate my layouts and graphics and it works a treat. love it.