Circa Software V2 on it's way soon.

We have experimental support for USB RS232 adapters, but due to how these items work the communications is quite slow. The best option is to use a Quatech PCMCIA serial adapter. These work very well and is what I use for all development of Circa. (I hope you laptop has at least a PCMCIA slot). There is an R&D effort active at the moment to address this issue in a more complete way at a hardware level, but i'm unsure of any timeframe on a result.

Downloading via C-Bus is not likely to happen in the next few months.

BTW: I "signed" off on the Marpa software 2 days ago and started working on Circa 2 again yesterday.

 

Circa 2 beta released.

http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1828

 

Circa2 release

Any idea when the release version of Circa V2 will be avaiable?

 

Hard to say. I'm trying to work on it but have had a lot of interupptions lately. The way should be clear to get stuck into it, there is certainly a lot of pressure internally to progress it to release.

Have you tried the beta? How was your experience? Was it stable and release quality? Was the feature level high enough? I have plans to implement a few more features before release (mainly inserting the missing features from Circa V1)

 

Well I can say that something is better in the beta version than in the previous, as we were having problems controlling A/C units which transmitted relatively long IR strings. Did you change the way strings are downloaded to the NIRT?, as in the previous version it seemed to miss or corrupt certain characters of an IR string when downloading to the NIRT - the beta version seems to have solved this. Apart from that the new interface is much clearer and straight forward as apose to the last version of Circa.

It was relatively stable, but it crashed a few times when downloading to the NIRT, I was using it on a win98 machine which could of complicated things.

All the features needed to download to the unit were present, I was thinking it would be nice to maybe combine IR Reader with Circa just to speed things up some what.

 

Circa V1 had a limitation where it truncated IR commands longer than 256 bytes (as stored in the project file). This limitation was removed in Circa V2. The only IR Commands that seemed to hit this limit are some brands of A/C.

Phew, good to hear.

When you say crash .... what happened. Did you just get a dialog syaing that a communications error had occured. Or did you get a larger exception dialog asking you to email the error report?

I haven't received any emailed reports.

The longer term plan is to fully integrate IR Reader into Circa, but certainly not for the V2 release.

 

There were two errors: one was connecting to C-Gate, sometimes I had to restart the application many times to connect properly ( it seemed to time-out).

The other was a communication related error when downloading to the unit, I cant remember the exact message, but it did ask me to email the message but the PC I was operating this on was not connected to our local network so I just had to reboot.

When I get another chance to use the program again (as another employee has taken our IR reader up north) I will see if I can repeat the errors and give a more detailed description.

Now we have a few sites that require that we learn these codes that are too long for the old Circa program, do you think the Beta version would be capable of doing this (i.e. are there any other issues) or should we wait for a more concrete version to be released?.

 

This has been a persistant problem under Windows 98. I thought it had been resolved, but obviously not. I would recommed that yo manually start C-Gate (link in Start menu) and then Circa should have no problems connecting.

If the PC normally can email when connected to the newtoek then the email will be saved in your "outbox" ready for when you reconnect. (if you tell it to send that is).

The information I need is saved int he Circa installation directory ( c;\clipsal\circa\ ) in the file called ExcMagic.Log . If you can get that file and email it to [email protected] and tell them to forward to Anthony Richardson (and that I requested that).

Well the beta is essential the same code as the shipping Marpa product, so I actually have a lot of confidence. The main reason it isn't released is because the full feature set to match Circa V1 isn't complete. There will be 100% compatiability between the project files created in Circa V2 beta adn the shipping version.

But after saying that I can't "OK" the use of the beta on a production site since it against policy. But it is extremely unlikley to cause any problems.

 

Hows the cmplete version of Circa 2 coming along ?
Will it have the delay option with the next release for IR Macros?
As well as the test IR feature like the old Circa?
Cheers

 

Getting there.

Not this release no.

Yes

 

Quick question, we have multiple NIRTs on the same network, each NIRT is going to control it's own A/C unit (they are all of the same make), is there a easy way of downloading to multiple NIRTs with the Circa Beta? As I have been told that in the older version of Circa you were able to download to multiple NIRTs (or configure multiple NIRTs) all in one go.
Thanks for your help.

Alex

 

You can not program multiple NIRTs simultaneously and Circa 1.1 did not support this feature. Given that the download time is normally 1-2 minutes is this a problem?

 

The guy that has requested this is currently out of the office at the moment, I'll get a hold of him when he get's back and maybe let him describe exactly what he meant.
Anyway I have another question, is the Circa Beta software compatible with the new Toolkit / CGate, if not is it planned to be released with support with the new Toolkit / CGate. As we have migrated our projects to the new version and it is a pain to have a seperate PC running the older version of Toolkit / CGate just to use the Circa Beta stuff.

Thanks for your help.

 

Yes, just make sure you have the latest beta.

 

I guess the new version is coming, (right?) because I can't use my beta anymore after installing tooklit 1.4....and there is no more "beta" in the download section. Suddenly I need to go all the way back to v1.1....

In fact, the most important addition I need would be an USB download cable, since most Laptop has no com port anymore, and no USB-Serial convertor seem working with the existing download cable.

 

There should be no problems using the current beta, are sure you have the latest?

http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2209