PICED System IO variables on Serial

Hi,

I have been moving all my old automation system across to CBus but need to maintain a few small interfaces across the serial interface. I have generated some User system IO variable in PICED logic (B&W CTouch MkII) but can't quite work out whether I can share this information across the serial interface or better still be able to externally update the variables through the serial.

The documentation does not seem to address this as far as I have been able to read. Any suggestions on whether this is possible and if so where I can find a reference?


Thanks
Glen

 

You can read and write System IO variables in logic. eg GetRealSystemIO, setRealSystemIO etc. See Logic help under System IO Functions. You will, of course, have to write some logic to read/write from the serial port, decode it, and set the appropriate system io variables.

 

Thanks Ashley, sorry I did not describe this very well. I was hoping to interface through the 5500PC serial interface across the complete network as I have interfaced another box that uses the lighting information etc and was hoping to be able to add to this.

Am I able to post these User variables (probably at some rate defined in the logic) to the 5500PC output for reading along with the lighting status updates and controls?

 

System IOs are local to a particular logic device and never appear on the bus so there is no way of directly accessing them via a 5500PC. The way to do this would be to create a group address in some application (You could use the lighting application or create a new specific one) and them map the system IO values to those group addresses via logic.

Is there any particular reason why you need to use user systemIOs? They are generally only required for interfacing to GUI components or providing a degree of non-volatile storage. If you just need variables to communicate with external devices creating virtual group addresses is the way to go. I generally just create a specific application in the lighting application range and create whatever group addresses I need to talk to the outside world. Whenever you change one of these group addresses in logic it will pop out of the 5500PC, and if you send a serial command into the 5500PC it can be picked up in logic with a ONCE command. No polling required.

 

Thanks for the advice Ashley, I think this will work fine. I was not aware you could have virtual Groups.