RE: Dr. John's Lighting System

[Keith Doxey <keith.doxey@xxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

Your lighting system sounds extremely similar to the design I had come
up with. Just havent got round to building it yet :-((

My personal preference is for easily programmable scenes selected by
single button press rather than fiddling with lots of buttons to set each
of the channels individually. This decision was reached after looking at
most
of the High End systems and looking what features I really liked.

At work we have a LUTRON ORION system about 5 years old which we
are looking to replace as the dimmer modules keep failing. Lutron do not
repair the modules, they only supply replacements at 280 UKP each :-((
However I have just repaired 5 of the modules, all of which had faulty
relays.
The relays cost 2-04 each !!!! So thats my wages covered for the month :-))
One thing that this has made me very much aware of is the possibility of
a complete lighting failure in the event of the controller crashing.

For that reason I intend that each of my homebrew dimmer modules will be
a stand alone system controlling either 4 or 8 channels and directly wired
to
the keypads in the room it controls. Each of the dimmer packs would be
networked to the main house controller which would oversee correct
operation
of the house. In the event of the main controller/network failing each of
the
dimmer packs would run in stand alone mode.

Keith


----------
From: 	Dr. John Tankard[SMTP:jtankard@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 	03 September 1998 16:21
To: 	'ukha@xxxxxxx'
Subject: 	[ukha] RE:   RE:   Stargate

I will have a PC for HA but I dont want to use it as a link in the chain, I
want my system to connect direct to the controller, the extra link, could
be a weak link.

Your DIN rail approach looks good as it give flexibility in the future. My
system is this:-

every light fitting in the house (including side lights) is home run back
to one of three wiring closets, each closet has two boxes one containing
the dimmer hardware the other containing the low voltage side, each light
switch position is home run back to one of the three wiring closets in CAT
5, each closet is interconnected with CAT5.

Each dimmer controls 4 channels for each room, which can be either 240v or
12v, the dimmer TRIAC's are controlled by a PIC16C65 1 for 4 channels. At
the moment my prototype also reads a 4x4 keypad which allows for each room
channel to dim/brighten separately or select 1 of 4 lighting scenes. When
finished however I will separate the functions onto another PIC all of
these will be connected to a RS485 network which will allow them to talk to
each other. Giving a separate dimmer module and a keypad/input module the
two will talk to each other on there own link and keypad/input module will
live on the 485 network.

What I really want is a system which will be very reliable but also
flexible, I dont want to stick bits together and worry if it will still
work in 5 years time

My inspiration is from Dr Edward Cheung
http://members.tripod.com/~edward_cheung/
who built his own system some
time ago, although he uses his own system for a front end, where I want to
use either Stargate or HomeVision 2 (wish)



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