RE: RE: Dr. John's Lighting System

["Dr. John Tankard" <jtankard@xxxxxxx>]

What processor are you going to use ?

What network did you have in mind ?

Had you any protocol in mind ?

I am thinking of optically isolating the triac firing circuit from the
control side (16C65) have you any thoughts on this you have obviously
looked at commercial units, the one's I have seen have no isolation, and I
am worried one fault could Zap the lot ?

The big problem I have is time, I spend most of my spare time renovating my
house (1st baby due in Jan) and when I do get some time to write some code
it takes me three hours to figure out what my existing code does !
Although I hope that will all change, my prototype is in assembler and I
am going to switch to C so that I can maintain the code, to make the
transition easier I bought my self a ICEPIC.

My 4x4 keypad has up and down on each channel (8 buttons) and 4 scenes (4
buttons) leaving 4 spare for coms to other controllers on the network.



-----Original Message-----
From:	Keith Doxey [SMTP:keith.doxey@xxxxxxx]
Sent:	03 September 1998 21:53
To:	'ukha@xxxxxxx'
Subject:	[ukha] RE:  Dr. John's Lighting System

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





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