General advice on scenes and DLT weirdness

Hi All,

I have been observing a little weirdness in the behaivour of my network and imagine it might be down to the way I have programmed things. I think I need a little best practice advice. I should say I use all DLTs from switching + a PAC.

Firstly the garden scene:

I have a garden scene which turns on 7 channels of lighting via a 4 way dimmer and an 8 way relay (4 + 3 resp.) and also a fountain (on the relay). I do this via a scene (set up with action triggers to allow labelling). There is also an all off scene button. The two other buttons are pump only and shed (light a path to the shed and turns its light on 3 groups used) Both are scenes but with far fewer groups (3 and 1 groups respectively). It seems I am getting some nasty interplay between scenes with dlt indicators not cancelling etc. I should add I am not using scene modifiers. Am I doing something wrong here - should all scenes contain exactly the same number of groups. Can I simply make a press of a button start a scene and then turn its indicator off ? (No idea how to do this).

Secondly, my all off scene. I now do this via an action trigger which fires a scene in the PAC which turns off explicitly 100 groups. Problem is, once again the DLT indicator seems to stay on all the time. Kinda want it to go off once the scene has completed.

Is there some best practice in approaching this things ?

I wonder if all buttons on DLTS should fire dummy groups and then have the logic in the PAC or something like that ?

Any suggestions on how to sort this out and what is best practice would be much appreciated.

Chris

 

I use On/Off on a virtual (dummy) Group on the DLT and use the PAC to monitor the group and run the Scene. With the same logic you could set the GA back to Off which will do extactly what you want

 

It seems like DLTs work best with just groups and scenes should live in either a PAC or a touch screen. That way labelling is trivial.

I wonder if I should use a non-lighting group for these labels.

If I am not careful I will start running out.

Chris

 

A good trick is to have your scenes in the CTouch and trigger them from a Key input. Use the trigger application, (Trigger group address - group level = action selector) and you should never run out of triggers/group addresses. Don't worry if action selectors are a bit confusing, I think they were meant to be Once you get your head around it, it makes sense.

Back to the orginal point - with the scenes in the CTouch you can modify and re save the scenes via the screen. This is an excellent feature for a customer who wants to modify a scene live without getting a programmer back. If its your own place you will appreciate not having to get the PC out...

If you are using a PAC then re saving scenes is not easy, however logic around scenes is really good. If you have both then there is not much you can't do

 

Thanks for the input - I presume you use a bell-press as the button type ? Given you are in the room I don't really need a DLT led telling me the lights are bright/dim/off !!!



Chris

 

Don't worry Ashleigh, Phil's a little slow. He's be spending too much time at 'Cool Skool'

And not enough time studying Toolkit during 'Geek Week'

 

Killing scene Indicators

Hi Guys,

A gracefull way to kill scene indicators if you have the scenes stored on the C-Touch is to set the DLT Trigger Group to an unused Action Selector in your All Off scene.
Triggering the unused Action Selctor will ensure any scene on the DLT is unset, but you get to keep the pretty [ SCENE ] key function indicator on the DLT.

Cheers,
Mark.