looking for help with CBUS on linux

Hi all,

I'm trying to get CBUS up and running from linux. So far this post has been very helpful:

http://www.cbusforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6137&highlight=linux

I have a few additional questions I'd like to toss out to the group here.

The first step was to get my unit addresses set, since they all come from the factory set to $FF. It seems like the only way to do this is via the windows-based CBUS Toolkit software. I've been looking for a simpler, non-GUI way to do this, but I haven't found one yet.

I did get C-Gate running on linux, and the toolkit seems to use C-Gate for communication, so that leads one to believe that there should be a way to set unit addresses directly from C-Gate. The docs don't give any clue as to how that would be done, though, so any help there would be appreciated.

The first device I set up was a 4-channel relay, which leads me to my next question: Is there no way to access the terminals directly, without first assigning each one to a group? Group assignment is another manual step in the CBUS Toolkit that I'd rather avoid. I'm hoping to find a way to do that either through C-Gate or directly through the serial protocol if possible.

So after going ahead and using the toolkit to set up the groups for the relay, I'm now to the point where I can open a socket connection to the CNI and send simple commands like this:

\\0538007900\r

...to turn on Group 0, which turns on relay 1. So far so good.

The next step is to be able to retrieve the state of the relay terminals. There doesn't seem to be a way to query the state of a group, and that probably doesn't make any sense anyway since a group could reference any number of switches that may be in different states. But is there a way to query the relay unit directly to get the terminal state? This is where I'm stuck at the moment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for reading.

- Jason

 

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the info on controlling groups from C-Gate, that was very helpful. I'd been leaning toward using the serial protocol, but maybe a C-Gate client would be easier.

About the toolkit, my goal is just to simplify the installation process. All we need for our application is to assign sequential addresses to each unit, then assign sequential group IDs to each channel. So the rest of the toolkit functionality wouldn't be used. It would be great to be able to automate that assignment instead of needing to do it by hand for each installation.

UPDATE:
It looks like it is possible to do the unraveling from C-Gate after all! There's an unravel command on network objects:

do 254 unravel

There's also an AutoUnravel setting you can turn on that will do an unravel if there's a sync error.

Now if there was just a way to assign groups from inside C-Gate!


- Jason