Ring Network???

Hi all,

Here's the background; ten year old commercial site, multi network, approx 60 -70 cbus devices per net and some areas have not worked since installation! This due to the fact that related input and output devices are fragmented across several networks.



The network as you can see is a hybrid combining star and daisy, the problem is i have groups of PIRs on network 250 that need to control relays on networks 252 & 253.

All bridges, bar one, are CBUS-1 (firmware rev 0.18c & 0.19) these appear not to have the functionality on the newer bridges and only give the option of either; send to adjacent or, send to remote, but not both.

Replacing all of the bridges is not an option (financial), the cabling is buried deep in the building so rewiring not possible and its a very big site!

However I have found a potential cable route that may offer a solution. My proposal is to link Network 250 & Network 253 with a bridge thus forming a virtual ring. I have read threads on this forum that state that Toolkit will not allow this? however the last paragraph on page 10 of the Network Bridge training manual says this is possible.

A difinitive answer would be good please, before I put my head on the block and commit to the client.

Thanks in advance

Paul

 

I'm pretty sure that Toolkit will allow such a configuration to be made, but it won't show the two networks as being linked in the Topology diagram, even though they would be physically and logically linked. You need to do it by hand, and by that I mean that you need to set the unit addresses of both sides of the bridge yourself; Toolkit won't do it for you, but it doesn't prevent you from doing it.

Another option instead of re-cabling may be to put a PAC on the backbone network. Configure your PIR and your output to use 2 different groups. The bridge will send the messages from the PIR to the backbone (assuming it's configured that way) and the PAC could then re-broadcast that message on the new group. The re-broadcast from the PAC won't have any routing information in the message, so any bridges programmed to forward traffic onwards from the backbone will pass the message from the PAC onwards. The Logic functions TrackGroup and TrackGroup2 make configuring this in the PAC pretty trivial. If you've got a PAC, Colour C-Touch, C-Touch with Logic or Wiser on the backbone you won't even need to buy another device.

 

TrackGroup2

Is the TrackGroup2 logic syntax supported in PAC and B&W MKII Touch Screens?

 

Good question. According to the help file TrackGroup2 is not supported on Spectrum/B&W C-Touch/PAC/Wiser. It's supported by Colour C-Touch only.

 

Many thanks to you all,

There is a B&W MK II touch screen (with logic) on the system so tried the TrackGroup solution first and as said, the function is not supported.

Only one option left, linked network 250 & 253 with a new bridge, installed and configued as per Newmans instructions, and all is well!

Once again, many thanks,

Paul