New User Guidance needed

Hi,

I have recently bought a house that has a C-BUS installation. At the time of the purchase I thought that the C-BUS system seemed cool and an asset to the house. However, now I am not so sure.

Part of the problem is that the previous owner didn't hand over the C-BUS programming files but the main problem seems to be the truly appalling standard of software that is the C-BUS Toolkit. I myself am a computer programmer of some 30 years and I'm not sure I've ever used a piece of software that is so un-user friendly. So un-user friendly indeed that I am told one is recommended to go on a multi-day course to learn how to program the thing! Either that or get in 'the installer' who charges $100/hour to make some adjustments. Really? Is that truly what people do?

Undeterred I thought I'd have a go. How hard can it be?

So, I installed the Toolkit. Surely, I thought, there must be a simple way of extracting the current programming to my computer. I install Toolkit 1.14.4. I then tried to extract the current programming using the default network. Sadly this just causes the Toolkit to go Bang! I contacted C-BUS Support who said they knew about the problem but who knows when a fix might be available! They gave me a work around to try and sometime later my house programming was being extracted.

42 Units and all looked well. Until I looked closer. No DLT labels! What! This is 'by design' I am told by Support. Even though I have 9 Saturn LCD switches which quite clearly show the 8 labels each the extract just says 'Group 1', 'Group 2' etc. How awful is that?

I looked closer still. These 9 Saturn wall switches are each programmed with various scenes. These are actually the things I want to change. For example the previous owner has a 'Movie' scene in the lounge which is more of less pitch black. I want to increase the light level slightly. This should be trivial right? Nope. It seems that the extract doesn't include ANY scene programming at all! Once again I call C-BUS Support. They tell me that I clearly don't have any scenes. Really? So, what are these things on my switches then? They have no answer. But apparently it is my fault not theirs. So, any ideas?

Meantime I finally get word from the original installer of the C-BUS system and he has a programming file for me. He 'thinks' it is the latest version but is not sure! Oh great, so I may install a previous version. Oh well I thought. I can at least load it up in the Toolkit and take a look. Nope. He gives me a CTA file which seems to be completely ignored by my ToolKit. What is that all about? No backward compatibility with your own files! Are you serious?

This is just appalling. It is just one mess after another. I think home automation and home control is a great thing and it is clearly the way of the future. However, I am not convinced by C-BUS. I will be advising every one of my friends and family to steer well clear of this system. The usability, reliability, customer support and general operation is awful.

I have been in the house 2 months now and have wasted hours and hours on this rubbish and I am still no further forward. As I say I am a Software Programmer of some 30 years. How on earth would a non-techie cope?

C-BUS support have been close to hopeless, does anyone have a sensible suggestion of how I move things forward. I just want to increase the brightness of a few lights - you wouldn't think it would be hard would you?

 

Hi Mq,

First off, while I understand your frustration, coming here and basically saying everything is just rubbish and then asking for help isn't going to get you very far.

You need to understand that C-Bus is a 'System' and not just a piece of software and there are literally hundreds of ways of doing the same thing, so something that may not make sense to you, may make perfectly sense to someone else and they may have programmed it that way. C-Bus is one of the most backwards compatible systems I have seen and in terms of 'needing 3 days of training for a program' shows that you have no idea what C-Bus actually is or the scope of it.

Now to actually try and read though your rant and work out your current problems.

1. Can't get the Group Address Tags from the network: That is correct, as C-Bus is a lightweight serial protocol it does not work with Tags, that is just for ease of programming. However the file that your installer gave you will have it inside the archive.

2. Toolkit wont open a CTA file, no it wont. A CTA file is a PICED file. From that information I would say that you have a touchscreen, a wiser or a PAC in your system. The CTA file is the archive of that program and will have your tag database inside it as well. Try downloading PICED and extract it using that.

3. Your wall stations 'should/must' have scenes in them. No, they probably dont, the Touchscreen, Wiser or PAC will be storing those and the wall stations will just trigger those scenes.

Hope this helps you get back on track and learn about your system. Yes, C-Bus can be complicated to do even small tasks, and yes there are more 'simple' systems out there, but from my experience C-Bus is one of the most reliable systems and is very flexible if you are willing to give it a go. Next time now you have found the forum ask for help or go on training BEFORE you loose your head. Tech Support aren't there to teach people how to use a system, otherwise the people who actually need them because things are broken would never be able to contact them.

J

 

Come to a forum where most people have invested there time and money into training and experience to really bag a product you seemingly have little understanding of? Not sure how u ever thought that was going to pay off..

And no offence but your 30 years of computer programming experience probably only gives u a slight headstart on anyone else when it comes to understanding cbus and how it works.. So many people over the years have assumed because they have some idea of computers and programming that cbus cant be that hard and think they will instantly get it..

You are lucky that tech support even spoke to you.. Quite often in the past if you hadnt completed cbus training and were trying to do programming they would tell you to go do training and hang up as they were inundated with far to many enquiries from non trained consumers..

As for the installer charging $100/hr, being a programmer of 30 years yourself surely you charge a premium for your knowledge and expertise.. I guarantee you that a suitably trained and experienced person would have taken no more than 2 hours to make the few changes you are talking about.. Surely money well spent compared to the hours and hours you have wasted?

PS if you think CBUS setup and software and support is bad you should see some of the other automation systems out on the market..

 

Thank-you for your reply, I will take a look at the PICED software. From the reading I have done I got the impression that it was for the Touchscreen devices, of which I have none.

I meant no disrespect to users of this forum however I stand by my comments. Since finding this forum I have read through hundreds of threads and the C-BUS system clearly is very difficult to use and fraught with hazard. I see no reason why it should be. 15 years ago you could buy Lego Mindstorms products which could do really complicated things but be programmed by 10 years olds. Literally!, since my son was one of them! Lord only knows how powerful and simple to operate they are now. And yet a decade later C-BUS have produced a system where they think it is reasonable that the system is so complicated to control that the owners of the house should stay away from it and hire in an 'expert'. Just to switch the lights on! Do I think it is reasonable that I should hire in an 'expert' at $100/hour every time I want to make a minor change to my lighting set up? No, absolutely not! Imagine if your house alarm systems or central heating systems felt the same way?

I appreciate that many people may have many hours vested in the product and have been using it for many years and may be upset by my comments. I also realise that many people make a living out of it's complexity. It is in those people's interest for the system to be as awkward and complicated as possible. So I am sorry if my comments caused any offence, that wasn't my intention. Much of it was clearly frustration. However, please take it as constructive criticism, the perspective of a new user. Sometimes when you work with a product for many years you fail to see it's short comings and something seems reasonable because 'that's the way it has always been'. To my mind the product that will win mass appeal in the market place is the one that that can be picked up and used with the minimum of fuss and the greatest usability. Just look at the product successes over the past decade. The ones that really take off are the ones that have the best usability. I have had no experience with any house automation products but I can't believe for a minute that C-BUS is high up there in the usability stakes.

Regards.

 

Every post continues to show how naive you are.

Even industrial systems are fraught with similar issues and they cost many thousands of dollars more. Not having groups names stored in the devices - surely you as a 30 year veteran should understand the consequences of storing all that data in the devices.

C-Bus is not complicated - you just don't understand it yet. As with anything, when you don't know it is hard. To expect to load a program and be proficient at the get go is foolhardy. Yes, you can go pay someone who has spent the time and effort to learn and you also have the option to spend the hours yourself (which are free as you are not running as a business) to learn what the system is and can and can't do. Yes it's not perfect - nothing is. It is what it is and is pretty damn good for something that has been around since the early 90's.

As to your comment re mass appeal - name one. Apple have mass appeal but are built for dummies. No flexibility, locked into a single bit of hardware, crappy interface.

Adding flexibility unfortunately introduces complexity.

 

I am perfectly willing to accept that I am naive. Especially when it comes to home automation.

However, every response seems to show a complete lack of willingness to view the system afresh. I think the 'its always worked that way' seems to be a pervasive attitude, which amazes me.

Take your recent comment..."surely you as a 30 year veteran should understand the consequences of storing all that data in the devices.". Is this really how you feel? Let's say I have about 100 devices. I don't think it is quite that many but let's say it is. Now, each label is say 10 bytes. So, that is 1K of data. 1K! Is that really what you refer to as 'all that data' ? Even in the 90's 1K was not a lot of storage. Now it is laughable. How much does your smart-phone have?

C-BUS does not seem to follow good basic rules of software development. Take backup/restore. It is good that you can download and store away the configurations for backup. But they should be just that, backup. For use when you have a disaster and need to recover. The master copy should be what is programmed in to the house. It should be simple to hit a 'Backup' button which takes a copy of the current programming. You should then be able to swap out any device and then click a 'Restore' button and all should be back up and running. Forcing people to keep track of these files and which is the latest copy.

Your other comment is a strange one. It 'is pretty damn good for something that has been around since the early 90's.'. The suggestion here seems to be that of course it is going to be worse because it has been around for a long time. Shouldn't it be the other way around? If it has been around for 25 years shouldn't it be really slick by now ?

So I am naive, I freely admit it. However, by the responses on this forum I am getting an inkling in to why the product is as it is. It seems that people are not really capable of seeing its shortcomings. Are you really suggesting that the C-BUS toolkit has a better interface and than an iPad or that in any way at all C-BUS is more flexible than an iPad or a Windows laptop? It is no contest in my view; an iPad and a Windows machine has far far more applications and yet doesn't require users to go on a course to use them. Sure, you can go on a course if you want but if you just want to do the basic things that 99% of us want to do then it is intuitive enough.

You make it sound as though I am using C-BUS to control the space shuttle. All I want to do is switch the light on. Press button A and have light B come on. Is that really what you count as hard ? Why should that require ANY complexity at all?

 

Hi mqguy,

I have purposely chosen only the positive message out of your mail. We can understand your frustration, but your position is like a rookie pilot who's just gone first solo after six hours complaining that the Airbus A-380 cockpit is un-user friendly to him, without ANY understanding of what's under the hood. If you are the type of person who wants a video recorder to have Play, Stop, Record and Fast Forward and nothing else, then feel free to stop reading here.

C-Bus is a highly configurable, distributed computing environment, not a single central host to be 'programmed'. It has been designed in this way to provide the most reliability and robustness that sees it literally running thousands of large commercial buildings, and an almost mind boggling number of residences like yours.

It has no 'central brain' to program like your experience has prepared you for, and so its Tools of trade are specific and to the layman, may look complex and complicated. This is due to the architecture where lighting can run, even with main logic engines down and the network segmented, but only if designed and implemented properly by a trained C-Bus specialist.

I agree wholeheartedly with Roosta's assessment that a normal C-Bus specialist or 'programmer' could have configured/programmed what you are suggesting in about 2 hours, probably even less. If it was the original programmer, probably 10 minutes. So you need to understand that time you are spending is just your learning time, which you are free to spend, but is not achieving your goal, just informing you better.

I do skills transfer sessions with my new clients with a technical background such as yours and usually, with some instruction and understanding, they can make the small adds and changes to their C-Bus network within a short period of time, but it is hard to start from zero with learning the 'Airbus cockpit' like you are attempting.

I suggest you spend a couple of paid hours with your C-Bus specialist or C-Bus installer, explaining you want to have some future autonomy of controlling your setup and ask him to show you how. It is somewhat easier when you have seen someone else do it, who has set up your machine to talk to the network properly with the right database of load names (The 'Tag Database') and your touch screen/PAC 'Project Files' for PICED. But don't be an ignorant starter, read something before he comes so you can at least understand 'The Basics'.

If you are a programmer of 30 years experience, you will likely have learned PASCAL, and this will give you a big leg up to using the more advanced logic engines, but only if you want to. Most homes don't use it, but it is there. Most things (>95% of operations) are very basic to program with Toolkit.

If you want to continue to self-learn, I suggest these great tools.

1. The Help file in Toolkit - Read it, it is extremely helpful and comprehensive and talks about what all the units on your network can do. Particularly take note of 'In the beginning...','Introduction to C-Bus concepts', and 'C-Bus architecture'

2. C-Bus Basic Training Manual Vol 1 (A great C-Bus newbie/C-Bus starters resource you can read in under an hour) and C-Bus Basic Training Manual Vol 2 (contains details about your DLTs labelling and scenes). There is also a workbook to get your brain 'in the loop' on programming.

MqGuy, all your problems are due to your ignorance of your system so if you really want to 'run your own ship', take the required time to at least 'know how to navigate'. You mentioned alarms in your post. Try reading the typical alarm programming guide and knowing what to do from scratch!!

And as for backward compatibility and future proofness that you touch on, C-Bus is way ahead. There are not many systems available today that have been around for 20+ years (read as 'experienced') where you can get a single new module/unit for your network (a Clipsal Wiser2) for around $2,000 installed that will allow you to run your whole home's existing C-Bus network from your iPhone, iPad or Android device, both at home and when away. The distributed architecture and backward compatibility is what gives you this ability.

Learn and you will be rewarded.........................

Brad

 

Lots of opinions here which makes for interesting discussion...

Probably the main points to keep in mind.

Everything is backwards compatible. That is, a C-Bus switch that was manufactured in 1995 will still operate with an eDLT that is manufactured today.
The protocol has continued to evolve through the life of the system
The comms speed is very low. This enables very robust communications that just works. I'm sure it's OK if your phone needs to reboot... not so sure if you want your lioghts to need to do that

The system has been designed to be scalable. It can be found in many large buildings in many countries and equally in small homes. Trying to have a system that communicates across 2 wires (sometimes installed badly) with lighting, HVAC, audio all working in harmony is no small feat.

Can I suggest you continue to take the time to read through the many threads and learn about the many benefits bearing in mind the vast installation types from zoos to sporting stadiums and why this product is considered to be one of the best in the market.

You may also find that if you take a different approach with your posts, you will get a vastly different response. Most people on this forum have a genuine love and passion not only for the products but this industry. Criticism from an alternative point of knowledge will not serve well. It's kinda like saying your child is ugly. Such a superficial comment without knowing how kind and brilliant the child may be is the best comparison I can make. Only complete understanding will give you a platform to judge.

You will come to understand the system is not an ugly duckling.... I'm sure you know the rest.

Good luck with your education on the system.

 

Hi mqguy

I'm sure you are more than capable of learning how to master CBus and change thing to your hearts content.

CBus is a solid product and it has been my experience that everything I ever thought should have been done some other way has been wrong.

In any case, working with what you have is going be a lot cheaper than rewiring the house you just bought.

This is a user form and if you want any assistance you really should stop bagging the product and ask questions one at a time.
Insulting the users who have no say in the product is silly.

Some training or alternatively reading the extensive literature and help files freely available would be worthwhile.

If you are having trouble with the software (and people often do with software on various Windows versions) I'm sure someone here can help you out.

 

My thanks to everyone who has responded. Yet again let me apologise if I caused anyone any offence. However, I have re-read all my posts and I can't find anywhere where I insulted anyone. If anything it was I who was insulted. I am less than complimentary about the product though and clearly many people on here find that hard to cope with. C-BUS is lucky to have such dedicated fans.

I do still stand by my comments though. These are the impressions of a new user. The developers of the product can either pay attention to these comments or not; it is entirely their call. Perhaps, as has been said before, C-BUS is fantastic at industrial complexes such as zoos and sport stadiums. However, I am trying to use it in my home. Perhaps it is just not good at that.

It is amusing that when I say that the system has low usability and is non-intuitive that people think the solution is yet more education. Doesn't that really just prove my point? Bear in mind that I am not trying to do anything complicated. The system is all set up. It was installed in my house 4 years ago. The installation is not particularly large either - I have 42 units. All I want to do is change some of the lighting levels.

For the record I have indeed read all the literature I can get my hands on. Before I even joined this append I read all the training PDFs and I have read much of the Toolkit help system. It seems the only thing I have missed is that the PICED software is probably responsible for my scenes rather than being programmed directly into the Saturn switches via the Toolkit. Somehow I got the impression that PICED was really for programming the touch screen devices.

People keep telling me that the C-BUS product is really popular. I am curious about that. What is the market penetration? I can't find any statistics on that on the Web. All the pages I find like 'Top 10 home automation products' don't even mention C-BUS. It is odd that after being around for 25 years that I had never heard of it nor do I know anyone else with it installed. One thing that is noticeable though is that all the responses I have received to my query have come from Australia.

Perhaps I will grow to like C-BUS, who knows. But right now I don't, I can't help that. Perhaps it is just not the type of product you immediately fall in love with. Back in the 90's it must have been really cool to be able to switch a light on in new and interesting ways. However, now I can install a web cam in my house and view it on my smart-phone from around the world with no effort at all or I can monitor my house electricity usage from anywhere on the planet. Just connecting things and doing things remotely is no longer sexy or impressive. People now just want things to work reliably, simply and fast. In fact they don't just want it they expect it.

Cheers.

 

I think this probably summarizes what you are not quite getting...

Yes, you can buy off the shelf DIY products that work and in these times of IoT devices, their abundance makes it all seem so easy. Try to get them all to talk to each other. And... reliability is the key! I have had may products that are the next big thing (including web cams) and they have almost always ultimately failed. Some after a power failure where they don't reconnect and others that are no longer supported plus a host of other reasons. C-Bus, just keeps chugging along quietly in the background and works every time I press a button

C-Bus just works! As Brad mentioned in another post, there is not the single point of failure with a CPU and this is probably the key.

Reading all of the available information is only part of the big picture. Published information probably makes up 20-30% of the detail. There is a massive amount of knowledge in the various industries that true systems integration works with. True (full) knowledge and understanding will never happen, not even to those who have been around this product and industry for 20+ years. However, when you have full understanding of...

-electrical installations (residential, commercial and industrial) including lighting(dimming and on/off... dimming is a science in itself), exhaust fans, ceiling fans, power monitoring, smoke alarms, motion sensors...
-HVAC ( residential and commercial)... huge area and very complicated (Nest's product can tackle about 2% of this area as an example)
-Security
-irrigation
-AV control
-access control
-Building Management Systems (BMS)
-Blind, curtain and shutter control
...plus many other smaller aspects

then consider yourself a long way down the path.

Any and every one of these, is an industry in itself and the knowledge and comprehension of them takes a very long time.... integration even longer

Try to bring them together in a cohesive way, and you will start to understand the challenges in providing a one size fits all system that a novice can look at and understand.

My final suggestion is this...

Don't try to compare this system (and industry) with what you know. Look with fresh eyes and an open mind and you will see what power there is. I fear that whilst you continue to compare apples and oranges, you're missing the core (pun intended) benefits.

 

Conformist,

There is so much wrong with what you have just said I barely know where to start. The point is I don't care about access control, Security, HVAC, irrigation, shutter control and the thousand other things C-BUS may or may not be able to do. What I want to do is switch a light on. It is a little like saying to someone who is trying to do email that in order to use it properly you need to learn word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentation applications. It makes no sense at all. I am happy for you that you have all this extensive knowledge but can you not conceded that it should not be necessary for the simple home user? All the complexity should be hidden from the user by good software not lauded as some kind of feature.

It is also not quite true to say C-BUS just works! Take a browse at the forum threads and you'll see it doesn't. In my own case we have had a number of oddities. We have been in the house 2 months......the ones I immediately recall are...

• Twice the C-BUS switches has not responded at all; the only way it seemed to get things to fire up again was to disconnect the power from the Wiser box and start it up again.
• When you do reboot the Wiser box the running lights along the corridors take 24 hours before they realise whether it is day or night time. In other words they come on during the day which is odd. After 24 hours they settle down.
• For some reason our bulk-head lights, which can only be switched on using a web page or Android App, came on during the day a few days ago. They are not driven by PIR and there is no manual switch. It has only happened once but it is disconcerting.
• About a week ago we found that our underfloor heating pump had switched on even though the C-BUS schedule did not ask for it plus it was about 28 degrees at the time. Again this has only happened once so far.

Now, some of this may just be programming errors I don't know. Certainly the previous owner described the first two to us and said he has just put up with Wiser hanging every few weeks.

We are curious about what else our house may decided to do on its own. However, at the moment, it is just a black box so it is hard for us to guess.

 

Please, don't bother trying to figure out where to start. I've been around long enough to know when I'm listening to someone who knows more than me.

Good luck with sorting out your installation. With the approach you're taking and being down on everything and everyone, I feel you're gonna need it.

 

Mqguy,

The fact I don't think you understand is Toolkit and all the other programming and configuration tools, are just that TOOLS. They are not designed to be used by end users.

Your major complaint seems to be that you can't just load up the software and start making changes, that is not surprising, you are just an end user.

The fact that you can even get the Toolkit software is probably what is confusing you, most dedicated systems configuration software is restricted in some way to try and keep it out of the hands of the end user like yourself.

So it is no good you arriving here and bleating about how bad the tool set is, because frankly if you were not just an end user and a trained (yes you learn to use toolkit at the C-Bus training course) installer then you would realise they do everything they need to do in a reasonably straight forward way without the unnecessary bells and whistles that would be required for novices such as yourself.

Now if you want to become a "super end user" who does do their own programming and configuration (and there are many here who do) then you need to learn the fundamentals of the architecture first (along with a fair bit of what conformist detailed as well) and put in some dedicated time. After all do you think the guys here that make a living doing this work would be able to do so if it was just easy end user stuff?

And BTW you say you never insulted us, but you insulted us by insulting our choices. We are all C-Bus people so telling us that the system we have chosen to learn and use is rubbish will not get you very far.

Rohan

 

Oh dear, you must find life very hard.

I like the Windows operating system but there are millions of people out there who think it is terrible and say that Linux or iOS is the way to go. I have never once considered that a personal insult. Similarly I quite like Toyota cars but I am quite happy with the fact that most of the cars I see on the road are not Toyotas. People are entitled to their choices and their opinions, that's part of what makes life interesting.

If this forum has taught me one thing it is that Australians are much more sensitive than one would imagine.

 

Not sure what your on about. In toolkit you have your active project. You can back that up for recovery, you can restore it for recovery. You can then send that file to the devices on the network. Quite simple actually.

Again as others have said your agro comments show a lack of understanding of the system, a willingness to accept it is what it is and learn how to program it properly.

I've worked in the data communications industry for a good 25 years now and every every system I have worked with has its quirks, but the key is to understand those quirks and get on with it. No point fighting it.

In my experience quirks come about due to evolution, and in industrial design companies don't waste time and money in revolutions, but just evolve.

One system that I work on (and am considered in my workplace to be one of the Guru's) is the Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise PABX system. Now there is one quirky system, especially as sometimes it responds in psuedo French/English, but the reason it is quirky because it has just eveloved, which in turn means it is very very stable. Just like a properly configured C-bus network.

Oh as for your problem, seems to me the biggest issue is the previous owner didn't leave the files for you. If you had them 95% of your programming issues would go away and the 5% would be understanding why the orginal programmer did what they did. What you are trying to do is reverse engineer and then expect it to be in a perfect logical format. In the programming world that would be like getting complied code and then expecting it to be able to convert it into the original programming language with everything in tact including programming comments. It just doesn't work that way.

PS the fact you posted this in the Wiser section says a lot about your knowledge or lack there of of C-bus.

 

I'm sorry, but your issue now seems to be with all Australians. This is a C-Bus forum for people who are interested in C-Bus, I suggest you go elsewhere.

Rohan

 

C-Bus is a very robust, well designed and thought out system which has kept up with demanding market requirements over 15 or more years.

Toolkit has evolved over that time and kept up extremely well with the systems needs. It is a tool which was not designed for end user use. Yes it has been before and will in the future for those who are prepared to invest in the time to understand the C-Bus system and the TK. There are extremely well run C-Bus training program's that Clipsal have offered installers over many years.

Clipsal would not be running these courses if it was as simple as connecting to a system and just programming it. Clipsal's support over those years has been and continues to be exemplary unless you antagonise them. Unfortunately you appear to have done just that. The forum guys that work with C-Bus and Toolkit on a daily basis are also very supportive and giving of their experience and time to people that reach out in the right way. Unfortunately you appear to have tripped at the start line and keep tripping around the track.

You definitely came to the right forum to get help however have gone about seeking that help in the wrong way. It is not your right to obtain support here it is a privilege.

 

Hi mqguy
This thread has hundreds of views and it is quite astounding how politely the few folks who have replied to your posts have been.
The way you are behaving on a forum like this where people bend over backwards to help each other to use a product which they have no developmental say shows some special kind of social difficulties.
But hey you are not the only person in the world like that.

It wasn't mentioned in the original post and I now see you have a Wiser.

Having a Wiser in a second hand home could well be a bit of a liability.
A lot of it comes back to the original installer/programmer but even then the expectations of the new homeowner are likely to be different to the last.
Purchasing an automated home does need special consideration.

Wiser "is" a liability if you don't need the features, don't want to pay someone to manage it or are not interested in learning how to work with it.

Wiser is a useful addition to CBus but nowhere near the reliability level of the rest of CBus hardware.
It does however do certain clever things for a relatively reasonable price.

If this house didn't have a Wiser I'm sure we would all be spared the sorry tale.
Having lights come on unexpectedly would be a nuisance.
Not being prepared to pay someone and not knowing how to program it is quite a disaster.

If you don't want to pay for programming or learn how to operate Wiser I think you would be best to have it removed.
Even then that is likely to necessitate someone doing some programming for you.

It is pretty ignorant to be bagging a system you don't even understand.

 

So I am wondering if we should be locking this thread down? It is starting to get personal and once things start going that way it never ends up well.

Mr MQ, it may very well be that C-Bus is not for you. I can do what you want, but if it doesn't do it the way you think it should, well that is your problem and not anyone elses. Perhaps start designing your own? Or go and buy the Phillips and Homekit stuff and use ITFFF to tie it altogether. Oh and when you manage to develop the mindreader module please let me know, I would be very interested in that.

C-Bus does have many flaws, the development may not have been keep up with in later years, but it still is a good system that works well and can do what a lot cant.

As the first responder, where I did try and help with the actual issues to start and get the idea that even what I said wasn't really understood. I feel that this all has gone down hill very fast. So like Conformist, I will not be replying any longer to this thread.