Adding 5500PACA to existing system

Hi folks,

After some helpful advice in another thread about moving/adding a switch, I bought a 5500PACA Pascal Automation Controller. Mainly as it will let me program the system via the toolkit, but also I can start to use logic once I get to grips with programming the system. I've never worked on C-Bus before tackling the switch move.

I just wanted to check about connecting the 5500PACA to my existing system. Here's the current box layout of 5 dimmers, which connect to the lighting system via a network socket below the consumer boxes:



Here's a photo of the bottom of those dimmer units:



Am I correct in thinking that I can simply add the 5500PACA in series with the dimmer units, as shown in my diagram below. It'll be a piece of cake if that's all I need to do, before getting in to programming .



Cheers,
Ian

 

Yes pretty much!

Just remember when you are using the PAC as a PCI (Programming interface) it will interrupt and stop it's logic engine and schedules ect, while you are connected through it.

 

Excellent! Thanks for the advice.

Is it easy enough to download the existing programming and back it up within the toolbox software, just in case I bugger it up?

 

It arrived this morning and I've just spend the past hour installing it . Connected it up fine and backed up the project to the Toolkit! Thanks for the help .

I'm just trying to figure out how to sort all of the names now that I've downloaded all of the programming. Is there a guide to see how to identify the switches/lights? I'm reading through the Basics Training Manual v2, but haven't seen this mentioned yet.

 

There isn't any automatic method to do so as the human readable labels aren't stored inside the modules. They're only in the C-Bus Toolkit project but you don't have that so you'll need to start from scratch.

You've got two options:

1. Connect to your network with C-Bus Toolkit. Open the Application Log page in the tree for your network. Get a notepad and go around pressing all the buttons on your switches whilst writing down what button + what time you pressed each one. Cross reference that with what appears in the Application Log to create human readable names for each group.

1. Press the local control buttons on each dimmer and then run around to work out what just turned on/off. Having a helper is good for this. You can then rename each group with the correct name.

 

Thanks TSMan, I'll give that a shot .