DLT labels reverted to default

I had just got to a position where I'd finished my CBus install and the DLT labels were all showing as I wanted. All of the unused labels were set to just a space to stop them showing.

Then I made a couple of changes to a couple of labels and found that all of my blank labels had reverted back to "Button 7", "Button 8" etc as they were when shipped.

What causes them to revert back to this?

Paul.

 

Hi Paul

It looks like you've found a bug in Toolkit. If a label is only made up of spaces then if you close and re-open Toolkit the space characters in the label name get swallowed up.

This has been found a bit late to be fixed in the soon-to-be-released version of Toolkit however hopefully it will not be too far behind.

If you are trying to make a whole page unused then you can set the key function to Unused and the labels to their defaults. The unit will then ignore that page alltogether.

 

I did notice that the spaces are not saved when opening toolkit again.

However, I'm also seeing the blank labels revert back to the labelling "Button 1", "Button 2" etc. What situation causes this to happen?

The buttons in question are set to group <unused> and function <unused>. The DLT label for <unused> is set to a couple of spaces. BUT only some of the labels get reset this way, others have EXACTLY the same config and remain blank.

I remember reading that a label will only be set if it has a group assigned to it - is this the case? In which case, what's the purpose of the <unused> tag in the DLT labelling screen? Or is this a bit buggy too?

Someone also explained that if you turn off "dynamic" labels, they'll be static. I don't understand this - can someone explain the results of turning off dynamic labelling and what happens when you subsequently label keys from toolkit?

Many thanks,

Paul.

 

OK but should toolkit be sending labels for the <Unused> tag or not?

Will the DLT pick this label up (doesn't seem to) as it doesn't have a group assigned to a key that's set as <unused>.

If that's the case, why does <Unused> appear in the DLT labelling screen?

Cheers,

Paul.

 

When you click on the Save button on the DLT labelling UI it saves all labels to the network at once. That means that if you've created labels with spaces in them, closed Toolkit, re-opened Toolkit, opened the DLT labelling UI and clicked OK agan then those labels that had spaces will not have them any more, even if you make no modifications to those labels. When Toolkit downloads these empty labels to the unit it sees this empty label message and it puts in the default text, which is Button 1, Button 2, etc.

If a key on a DLT unit does not have a group address assigned to it then the unit will not apply any subsequent label messages to the key, since the labels are sent per-group and not per-key. The list of labels is taken from all groups in DLT units that are assigned to keys. Groups that don't have a corresponding DLT key assigned are ignored. If a group address is being controlled by a DLT key then it will appear in the DLT labelling UI.

The unused group cannot be labelled and it does not appear in the list of labels.

If you turn off the Dynamic Labelling feature in the units then they will subsequently ignore any messages that apply a new label to that group address. Given that the only way to apply labels from Toolkit (for the moment...) is using the Dynamic Labelling feature, disabling it effectively locks all the labels in the unit at their present state.

The Key Labels tab on the DLT UI's is intended to give a quick summary to the installer of what labels will appear on that unit. It also allows the choice of 1 of 4 label variants for each Group Address. The variants allow the labelling of up to 4 keys that control the same group address to be different, such as Fan Low, Fan Med, Fan High and Fan Off. The label variant is a setting specific to the unit so that's why it appears on the individual unit UI. If you start to select different label variants you will notice that those extra variants will appear in the list of labels on the DLT labelling UI. In contrast, the Dynamic Labels are network-wide settings for the Group Address which is why it's programmed as a network-wide and not a unit specific setting.

 

Thanks, that makes sense.