Presently I am on a new installation with 35 devices so far. Now being my first ?Newbie? I have been eagerly studying C-Bus and using the easy to understand Tool-Kit. Some great things the toolkit has that I noticed while programming is: ? A way to see the voltage on the C-Bus by opening any of the units. ? A generic current consumption and current supply providing you fill in the unit field. ? A intensive log file the documents what is going on, it is great for troubleshooting. ? A way to create a list of groups and address in excel then convert to plain text and copy right into the project. ? A way to unravel when the new unit has the same address (typically the default 255) as another on the project. ? And the best part is when the tool-kit freezes because of a screw up on my part it will send the data to Clipsal for review to better the product software. For a person whom is self taught with no formal training the C-Bus toll-kit is very user friendly. I have to admit the designers / engineers thought of most everything as anyone can program if you just point the mouse around. My only dislike is the old fashion DOS program running in the background running Java. Alan Dobbs Industeq, Inc
On behalf of the software development chaps: ~collectively we all blush a bit and say "gee thanks"~ Yes - a GREAT deal of though has gone into Toolkit - the objective is to make life easy, and we have about 7 million ideas for improvement and making life even easier. The java window running there is to host cgate. Cgate is a java app, free, and available to anybody who wants to develop controlling progams for C-Bus. We eat our own cooking - so Schedule Plus, for example, also uses cgate. The user interface into cgate is published, and is also free. In fact you get it in very Toolkit install. Just go poking around in the cgate folders and you will find a user guide. HOWEVER - cgate can't yet run as a service, silently and transparently in the background. This is on the development agenda. However, then number of developers is small, and they have a very full development agenda which keeps them all working many hours in each day - and unfortunately some things just keep getting deferred. This is one of them.
I may add the best part is the "Find C-Bus Networks" as the days of the old 9 pin RS232 on laptops are a thing of the past. Now it is a string of USB adapters and hope for the correct driver & port configured. Now throw in Wi-Fi and Ethernet adapters and we all scratch our head looking for the project. All the Clipsal engineers? made it just on click of the mouse to find. If it is not there then go turn on the breaker to get power to the C-Bus Alan Dobbs Industeq, Inc
