Troubleshooting cgate connection problems.

I am experiencing frequent problems when connecting to my network with the toolkit and I am wondering how to troubleshoot. Is it more likely to be the c-bus network or my IP network or the CNI. Should I check the signal on the C-bus?

• This is intermittent. Sometimes all works perfectly, sometimes not at all and it is impossible to connect to the network at all; or some times I can load a number units then not the others. At other times I can load all the units but after a while I cannot save my edits anymore.
  
• The cgate logs shows various types of errors ranging from possible duplicate addresses (but the address in question is different every time) to "unknown c-bus reponse" or "unknown SAL command" but the address of the device at fault does not necessarily corresponds to an existing device.
  
• The Java windows shows an index out of bound error.
  
• I am connecting though a wiser and often the wiser hangs in transparent mode.
  
• Otherwise the c-bus networks seem to operate normally.

Thanks.

 

Sounds to me like your network is somewhat marginal.

I suggest you connect to your network using the C-Bus Diagnostic utility and put it in Traffic Analyser mode. It will give you a pretty good idea of the quality of comms on your network.

The Wiser suspends normal operation when it is in Transparent Mode. Regular Wiser functionality is suspended whilst another device, in this case Toolkit/C-Gate, is using the Wiser as a connection point to the network. You should find that normal Wiser operation resumes fairly quickly after you disconnect Toolkit from the Wiser.

 

What do you mean by "marginal" ?

Otherwise thanks for suggesting the traffic analyzer. However I am not sure if I should be worried about the output or not, see attachment.

 

By "marginal" I mean that your network is successfully communicating, but only just. There may be very little headroom on the communication reliability.

An error rate of 3.3% is certainly higher than I would be comfortable with. It's time to check the basics of your communication integrity. Check network voltages at all the nodes, making sure you have 1 and only 1 burden enabled (unless the Toolkit calculator tells you to have none), 3 units configured as clock generators, ... all the basics.