Recent experience

Instead of a whinge, I'd like to be positive.

On the weekend, after being away from C-Bus for about 3 years, I decided I needed to reconfigure my C-Bus wireless switches - something I'd been promising the eldest son for the last 12 months.

I needed to change a couple of wireless Saturn switch setups, as well as generally check things, recover the long-lost database and so on.

Once I had downloaded the latest Toolkit (which is much nicer than 3 years ago), and connected the relevant wireless hardware (again, piece of cake, nothing difficult) I could scan the network, and load the device properties. Everything JUST WORKED.

My only trouble was remember how to use wireless house code learn to join a new switch to the network - once I read the instructions (too long ago - could not remember how it worked), that unit appeared on the network as well and I could load it.

Reconfiguration was easy. Setup, test and save were all easy.

In fact... easier than I remembered it 3-4 years back... the background sync on Toolkit is nice - a big improvement in getting information up FAST and then filling in the holes in slow time. At least I could see what I was dealing with quickly and identify that there was a unit missing from the network.

The whole update / reconfigure was sorted out within 15 mins - including dealing with an oddball load that needed some strange minimum load setting.

So - Toolkit dudes and dudettes - and all the other people out there making C-Bus products - its still good. In fact, better than I remembered, and it still makes a nice impression on the walls and DOES WHAT I WANT!

And that's after some changes of load types (urgh.... a few LED loads have replaced a few incandescents, though not everywhere. A cupboard full of old incandescents sees the kitchen light live on...), many years in the same house, a bathroom reno, and various other fiddles and changes that have been made since installation.

C-Bus is still damn good

 

Dave I well remember the pre-Toolkit days, and I regarded all that as an engineering tool for use in the lab, not a proper commissioning tool. How people managed with it escapes me.

(Then I saw the KNX commissioning tools - if you thought the old dbase "cbus 2" setup s/w was a bit clunky, you aint seen nothin.)

Toolkit is very slick compared with some of the other "mainstream" junk out there.