Dali commissioning

First my thnks to ashleigh for the support.

Dear friends,
We had an installation of C-Bus system using DALI Gateway with DALI lights, DALI lights are operating through C_Bus NEO series switch, we are unable to dim up and down as normal. Its going suddenly to full bright and then to the position as how much we pressed. we cannot control the dim up and dim down as normally. with touch screen using slider its working. please help us to solve this issue, we know there is some small mistake in programming from our side but could not find the solution for last one week.
waiting for your reply

thanks & regards

Bijoy K R
Sr.sales Engineer
TISSCO- ESD
DOHA
QATAR
00974 5772985

 

DALI Fade Times

Hi,

This sounds like a Ramp Rate / Fade Time mismatch to me.

Touch screen sliders send out a series of "set to level X instantly" commands, in order to track the random movements of the user input.

A dimmer button on a Neo sends out a "Ramp towards 100% over X seconds" command when you first press it, then a "set to level X instantly" command when you release. If your DALI Ballasts have their Fade Time parameter set to instant (or generally quicker than c-bus) you will see them first go to 100% when you press the button, then to the set point when you release the Neo button.

Possible solutions:
1. Use the "Automatically match ramp rates from C-Bus to DALI" option in the Toolkit UI. When enabled, the Gateway will choose the closest DALI Fade Time to the C-Bus Ramp rate used. It works quite nicely. Be warned; this causes the DALI gateway to dynamically reprogram the Fade Time in the DALI ballast, so if you have carefully set up these DALI params and don't want them changed, don't do it! Enabling it also adds about a 100ms delay as commands are tunneled from C-Bus to DALI.

2. Manually set your DALI Fade Times to values close to the C-Bus ramp rates you use. This get complex if you use too many different values, so i'd suggest picking 4 or 8 seconds and using the same thing everywhere. It's waaaay less funky than auto matching of ramp rates, but is simpler and has less delay.

Hope that helps,
Mark.

 

Thanks

Mark, thanks alot for the valuable guidance.

One more doubt related to DALI.
there are 80 lights in same location in side the barrisole. all these lights to be operated together through C-Bus neo switch up and down. scene not possible, so we need it be organised to single group in C-bus.
but using 1 DALI gateway we are unable to do so because when we give a C-Bus group address to DALI A side group, then the same C-Bus group address is not getting for the DALI Bside group, now we solved this issue by changing the wiring to another DALI gateway, now 2 DALI network of same C-Bus group address are in 2 different DALI Gateways.

Is there any solution using 1 DALI gateway and one C-Bus group address for more than 64 DALI devices

Thanks & Regards

 

1 C-Bus Group -> 1 DALI Action

Hi,

The way the firmware works is each C-Bus group maps to a single DALI event. The reasoning gets complicated, but its mainly to do with keeping everything in sync. Eg. If you link a C-Bus group to two individual DALI Ballasts, what do you do when mapping back from DALI to C-Bus is enabled and you receive a DALI command to control only one of those two ballasts...
What you are trying to do doesn't quite fall within that example, as you have 2 different networks, but that's what's going on under the hood.

Anyway, your best bet of controlling the two DALI groups via one Gateway is to use two C-Bus group addresses. This should be easy using the control devices you mentioned; Neo and Touchscreen.

Neo: Use the blocks tab to make the key control two group addresses at the same time. There are lots of examples around in the help file or on this forum.

Touchscreen: Make a scene with the two groups in it and use toggle/dim buttons or sliders to set the scene to the desired level.

GL,
Mark.

 

can you please advice me deeply about the bold item?? and how to manually set the ramp rate of the c-bus to matching it with dali..

thanks...

 

App Note

Hi,

Check section 1.3.1 in the DALI App note for details: http://www2.clipsal.com/cis/__data/page/2091/C-Bus_DALI_Gateway_2_0.pdf
If you have any specific questions it doesn't cover, I'll see what i can do to answer them.

Disable automatic matching of ramp rates in the gateway, then set all your C-Bus Ramp Rates in key units that use dimmer buttons to control DALI loads to the same value, then set the Fade Time parameter in all your DALI ballasts to the closest matching option. The c-bus ramp rates and fade times are listed in the app note above, 4s or 8s is usually best.

Cheers,
Mark.

 

Dali ballast with Light level sensor

Hi,

I have a Dimming Zone of More than 20 Dali Ballast Connected. I want to control dimming zone with Cbus Light level Sensor. But in Cbus Light level sensor i can able to assign only one group adress. But in Cbus mapping it is able give the same Cbus group adress to all 20 Dali Ballast

How i can do it can any body help.

Suresh

 

make the 20 x DALI ballest's a 'DALI Group' of which you have 16per loop, then assign the C-Bus group in the light level sensor to that DALI Group in the Gateway.

 

May be you can set the FADETIME and FADERATE so it can dim smoothly.