Re: Anyone using a harmony 2 wire X10 dimmer module yet?

[Simon Pawson <simonp1234@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've a few.

How detailed a review do you want?

At the moment they are wiring up my dining table (and have been for a
while). I rigged up a test circuit or two to see if they: -
(1) worked. Responded reasonably well to external signals as well as the
local signal. One of the options made them noticeably slower to react
though (or was that the AWM4? ). It mentions it in the docs. I can check
up if you need to know.
(2) worked OK with the LV trannies and LV lights. Not appreciably
buzzing.
(3) worked OK with the GU10 and other lights I have planned.
(4) how big are they with wires?

What would have been nice is a version that would work with low energy
bulbs. I don't know if a bypass resistor would work and the pros and
cons of using one?

The main project is to automate my hall/landing lights and to add extra
switching without gouging holes in the walls as I'm not a very good
plasterer and the cable paths would be very messy. That required some
interesting design compromises and this was the cheapest of three or so
designs I came up with. I'll also use them to retrofit some other lights
that I'll have on security timers (see later).

After (4) above I realised that the existing (very shallow) back boxes
wouldn't work. None of the light switches are single ganged at the
moment (one triple with double two way switching on two different MCBs)
so there was just too much space used by the wires. I will be leaving
some of the lights set up conventionally. The switching will be done
with Clipsal switches with conventional switches as required. It is a
shame that the push switches have the text on them though. The idea will
be that come moving time I can just put in conventional Clipsal switches
and de-HA most of it for the luddite that may follow. The rest will come
out.

I'm at the stage where I've dug out the boxes and put new deeper ones in
and made good and done loads of painting. I intend to connect up some of
the new lights conventionally and then do the interesting bits. I'll be
programming  the units on the table before fitting.

Lastly some of you may remember that I was looking for software to run
'out of house' macros etc. I got demos downloaded for both the main
windows X10 packages and set out to test them on a very old 700mhz Duron
with 256Mb under XP. The idea being that if ran under this it would run
next to Geovision on a P4 2.8Ghz with 1Gb memory. Installing the first
bit of software made the machine crash. After lots of Ghosting of disks
it turned out to be the whole machine (MB?). Eventually even running
native windows or a linux boot CD that used graphics made it die. I have
just replaced the MB and will try to repeat that comparison if anyone is
interested. I assume nothing has really changed apart from maintenance
releases in the last few months.

One of the annoying things about the demo versions is that one of the
vendors doesn't do a version of its software that supports macros which
is a shame.

This is part of a larger project that has ceiling speakers in En-Suite
and Bathroom and other changes so it will be a while before it is
finished.

If you have any other questions or any queries please shout.

Hope this helps,

Simon


In message <d6fa6j+8vqp@xxxxxxx>, Steve Edwards
<steve@xxxxxxx> writes
>Anyone got on of the HDM1 modules installed yet?
>
>Care to do a mini-review :-)
>
>Cheers
>
>Steve

--
Simon Pawson