Upgrading from a 5500PACA to a 5500AC2 (or 5500NAC2)

Hi Team,
I'm considering upgrading from a 5500PACA to either a 5500AC2 or 5500NAC2, but I don't have any sense for which of the newer AC2/NAC2 units I need or how to determine which I should buy from a compute load or Lua program size perspective.

I have 91 CBus Units on two CBus segments with a Bridge unit linking the segments, and 236 Lighting Groups.

I also have a HomeBridge running on a RPi 4 that exposes all the CBus control to the Apple Home App on our various iOS devices, which all works relatively well and is stable.

However, we're considering selling our house and downsizing in a few years, so I need to tidy up things ready to sell and remove the DIY bits.

So I decided to get one of these newer AC2 or NAC2 units and migrate all the logic from the PACA into the AC2.

Can anyone tell me how to estimate the size of the logic and "load" to determine which of the AC2 or NAC2 I should buy?

Regards

Alex Shepherd

 

If you’re selling the property I wouldn’t recommend purchasing either. If the PACA is working fine keep it as is. Otherwise you’ll need so spend countless hours converting all your logic to the AC2 plus setting up a GUI for the new owner to enjoy. Think of return on investment with CBUS

 

The issue I wanted to solve was giving the future new owners a good SmartPhone experience using only standard CBus solutions that local service providers can easily support. It needs to look and be tidy/reliable without needing any local guru's to keep it working

In terms of the reengineering effort - I've got a son who recently graduated as a Software Engineer last year, so I figure he needs some software engineering challenges. and he's not paying rent, so I just thought this could be a win-win solution...

 

Sounds like a win win then. From memory the difference between the AC2 and NAC would be the total modbus points, someone correct me if I’m wrong but for a domestic install a AC2 should fine

 

Ok, I'll order a 5500AC2 then, as that should do the job, and I don't have a lot of logic.

 

Perfect! Also nothing wrong keeping the PACA on the network too and just having the new AC2 doing all the cooler functions

 

The 5500AC2 is the way to go for your use case.

The 5500AC2 and 5500NAC2 are the same hardware, the 5500NAC2 is marketed as having licensing to support more modbus and bacnet points, as well as suport for exit/emergency testing/reporting.

 

the cheaper one sounds the best, to be truthful an unexperienced software user would have more ability to understand and read the pascal language in the PAC compared to Lua scripting? and the piced software is intuitive where as the programming while directly connected to an NAC or SHAC is more cumbersome. I mean its your money and preference I would maybe just setup some visualisation on the SHAC and leave the PAC running depending on the size of the project and complexity of the logic.

 

I've now got a 5500NAC2 that I'm learning how to configure...