TICA Question

I'm surprised you have been able to get hold of one because we are not selling them in South Africa. We are not allowed to sell them there until we have telco approval to do so.

This approval is being pursued at the moment. The unit does support South Africa, but at the moment you cannot select it. When we have approval you will be able to select this as the country.

Our approval has currently *failed* during testing for South Africa - the issue is detection of very short duration DTMF tones. We are not sure of the exact cause of the failure, because the modem manufacturer assures us that the modem will detect the tones OK.

We hope to have this resolved soon.

In the meantime, I must re-iterate that it is not legal for Clipsal to sell this item into South Africa. If you got one from somewhere else, thats your business!

Regarding your other issues: The CBTI waits for a LACK of DTMF tones before hanging up the line. This is why you see the line being held for a period after a call ends.

We have had numerous requests to change (reduce) this period - there is a cost of course: the time available for you to enter DTMF tones will be reduced from the current 1 minute. (If no DTMF, the CBTI says "righto, the line is idle, I'll hang up"). The timeout has to be SOMETHING, so its a compromise between how long to hold the line, and how long to wait for DTMF before giving up. Too long and too short are both annoying.

I'd ideally like to make this about 20 seconds, but configurable through the TICA configuration software.

Your other issue - lack of detection of DTMF could be caused by the test failure I described above (the test was originally done using the UK setting - don't ask me why. Grr.) It could also be related to some mobile phones which cause poor DTMF detection. I think I have a way ahead for that one also.

I'm working through the CBTI firmware right now, looking at this and a couple of other issues. If all goes well there will be a new firmware release in the next week or two.

 

If you dial in to the CBTI, and go through the menus and use option 9 to exit the session, you should be able to dial in again immediately after.

On the other hand, if you dial in, do things through the menus, and then just hang up, then the CBTI will have a 1 minute wait while it tries to determine if the line is idle or not (its looking for DTMF).

This is *probably* the line hold period you are seeing.

Some telco's (for example in Australia) are set so that the exchange sends a BUSY tone when either party hangs up. In this case the CBTI detects that tone and hangs up. Obviously this is not happening in South Africa, OR your busy tone is different to the UK busy tone so its not being detected. You can check this by calling a friend. Make sure you hang up first, and get them to listen. If they hear a busy tone after you hang up, then the CBTI will be able to detect this case an optimise its performance.

Not many telcos seem to do this though....

 

The CBTI has a limit of 32 groups that can be controlled.

This limit is due to available memory in the unit, and the inordinate amount of time it would take to get the status of all of them.

Its *not* possible to change the firmware to support a hiearchical grouping system. (Well not without a vast amount of effort which cannot be justified at the moment. Its hard enought to justify fixing the reported defects.)

 

Minder Pro is a rebadged product sold in some markets (not Australia). I know nothing at all about its capabilities.

I believe that HomeSpeak can do more, however, its different when you are talking to the machine.

I could *contemplate* going to 64 groups, without any hierarchical menus, in a future firmware update. But beyond that is a very tall order.

Its our belief that most customers in most markets will want to control between about 5 and 20 groups via telephone. Its not generally necessary to control an entire site - only enough to achieve a useful outcome via telephone.

Remember also that this product is highly configurable. More groups = more configuration, which makes it even more difficult to set up than it is now.

If you really want a vast number of groups, I suggest you find a DTMF / telephony package and write some software to link that to C-Gate.

 

Yes, we did the C-Bus Enabled certification testing on it.

Not quite the case. Refer to the official announcement about ceasing supply of Minder.

Clipsal sell the Comfort system in some countries, not all. You can probably work out why.

No comment.

It has been done before using off-the-shelf telephony software.

Its both memory and (significant) coding changes. I did not write the code in this product, and I'm finding it very challenging to maintain it.

No promises but I'll see what I can do.

Agreed.