Communication between networks

I have reached the 2A limit on my network. To solve this I have moved the 30 shutter relays onto a second network using a bridge and added two 5500PS units. Both networks are fine and talk to each other.

The problem is that now, when a button is pressed on (say) a reflection light switch on Network-1 to control the shutter on Network2, the LED on the switch stays on. It makes no difference if I use one button with Shutter Toggle or two buttons with Shutter Open/Shutter Close or Shutter Open Toggle/Shutter Close Toggle.

I do seem to remember something about the LEDs in switches not correctly displaying state when used across networks. Can anyone suggest a solution (other than putting the shutters back on the same network).

Thanks

 

This is not my special area but I assume you can talk to all the outputs from the laptop and that everything behaves normally.

Are there any latency settings you can use which would take into account the distances and change of network ?

What about a scene controller ? Do those help with controlling complex networks ?

 

There is no problem with comms (I have set this up on a test platform on a desk, so no distance, latency issues).

Everything works properly except for the LED on the switch not going off. I can understand that it would stay on if the blind were in a 'non-off' state (ie: not fully open or fully closed).

When the shutter is on the same network as the switch everything works fine so it must have something to do with the way the 2nd network communicates the state of it's units back (I guess)

 

abg, the messages that feedback the exact position of the blinds are local to a single network only. They don't get sent across bridges.

You should be able to show the correct states in the indicators if you use 3 button control, with separate Shutter Open, Shutter Close and Shutter Stop buttons.

If you don't care about being able to set the blinds to partially open/closed positions you could change the key functions on the Reflection units to use the Shutter Open and Shutter Close (2-buttons) or On/Off (1-button) command. The blind would then fully open and close in response to a button press and the indicator would show the correct state.

 

One room has four independent blinds and unfortunatley they do need to be partially opened at times so I'd need a lot of buttons...

Is there anyway that a PAC (or some other logic) could query the status of the shutter and then set the LED on the reflection to the correct state?

 

If you have the same group in more than one relay, then you could mount one of the relays on the same network as the reflection key unit and the status LED will operate correctly.

In general, splitting a network across bridges should always be done in a way that minimises traffic across the bridge and does not break input - output pairs if possible.

A bridge can allow extension of network length, provide isolation between networks and allow more units to be connected, but forces all communication to go through a single point, which goes against one of the strengths of C-Bus as a distributed system. The best thing you could do would be to re-distribute the units that are on each side of the bridge so that the two networks can as much as possible operate independently.

 

The other option, if you can't put a relay on the input network, is to use a spare logic slot in any other output unit on the "input network". This is the trick used to have groups tracked that are used in PAC units etc... that otherwise are not used by output units.

open the gui for the other output unit, enable a logic row, select the group address used for the light status, then disable the logic row and save the unit configuration.

I'm not sure if there would be any contention between the 2 output units over the correct status of the group address, but I think it would work.

 

If you had a PAC on the "relay network" then you could use that to update a different set of groups used just for reporting status, and then have those groups in the output units of the "input network". This would create a one-way update of status across networks.

Certainly a little bit messy, but that should be quite safe.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. Time to do some experimenting.