Re: Re: CBus???

[Kevin Hawkins <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

HV is best left running its schedules (which it's really good at) and
as
some of it's I/O is polled rather than interrupt driven it's important
that minimal load is placed on its processor by other things or triggers
can get missed. Sending ON,OFF and DIM commands is fairly trivial as you
say but synchronisation and tracking is more demanding. Within HV the
string handling is pretty rudimentary too and as you say buffer space is
precious and the serial I/O doesn't offer adequate leeway. At one stage
I was trying to use HV's video buffer RAM to get around this but it was
all getting very messy and clogged.  That's really why offloading custom
lighting to a co-processor is the preferred way.  After all if you care
about getting it right - which obviously you do if you've opted for
C-Bus then you don't want to kludge it in the middle.

I know a lot of UKHA'ers use HV , it would be great if C-Bus was
established (or even available !)  in the US as then there would be
loads of potential users. I do have all the required bits (apart from
time) to get this working including a suitable hardware platform and the
complete C-Bus protocol info. The public release of the C-Bus protocol
lacks some information that is critical to the support of status and
bridged (ie Wireless) C-Bus networks.

So ....if Phil can muster two sides for the match I'll seriously give it
some attention.   Of course all other incentives welcome - UK wireless
samplers ;-) ?? Likely price would be £150 ish though - attaching to
your existing C-Bus serial interface or £200 ish with an inbuilt C-Bus
interface SIM.   You would be dedicating a HV serial port to the C-Bus
gateway and also your C-Bus PCI (if you opted for the lower cost
version).  I'll try and pop some revised pictures of the existing
hardware up so people can at least see the finished board design. The
existing ones are of early versions.

Kevin




bensbarn2001 wrote:
>
> I'm also interested in the HV/Cbus. I have HV controlling Cbus which
> for basic work is easy - but it'd be great if something was keeping
> track of the status of the cbus network, which I guess is probably
> possible without dedicated hardware, but tricky and there may be
> issues with the size of the serial port input buffer.
>