The Perils of HA controlled lighting at Christmas

["Timothy Morris" <timothy.morris@xxxxxxx>]

I've finally spent some time working on the interface between my
Menvier
Alarm system (well spotted James) and my Polaron lighting system. I ran
into a few problems programming the lighting side, and was advised by
the manufacturer to upgrade the firmware in the lighting panels.



Everything went fine until I rebooted the panels, and then nothing! No
lights anywhere, control panels all locked out, no access via the
serial
port (I could upload scene definitions but not select any scenes)



It looked like I was going to be without either lighting or curtain
control until the 2nd January - and at this stage the curtains were all
closed and the lights were all out. Panic is starting to set in. The
factory is closed, but luckily I have email addresses (at home) for the
contractor who works on the PC software, the technical director, plus
the sales manager and the lead firmware developer.



I fire off an urgent email to all of them, and within five minutes get
a
response of things to check (all of which in fact I'd already done). I
then hook up hyperterminal to the interface under my desk, and see that
the system is sending out a command to select scene number 4064 (that's
right you can select a maximum possible number of 4065 scenes per data
highway). Other button presses would register on the highway, but they
had no effect.



Then a lightbulb appeared over my head. I remembered reading something
and then discarding it. The new panels (which I have) are fitted with
an
Alarm input. On an Alarm condition the system goes to scene 4064 (which
as I hadn't programmed it would set all the lights to zero) and locks
out all other forms of input. As alarms are on default set to go into
open circuit, and I had nothing connected to the alarm circuit on the
panel, it went into an alarm condition. It wasn't implemented in the
version 7 firmware in my panels, but is implemented in the latest
version 11 firmware. I hadn't paid much attention as the 8 channel
alarm
interface I'm using has this feature built in.



Some times mechanical switches do have their advantages!



Tim. 



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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