Niles ICS

ericmedley

Hey all,
I'm about to program for one of these things in a system. The protocol seems pretty straight-forward. I'm not anticipating any trouble.

Has anyone had experience with them and are there any pitfalls I should watch for?

Thanks in advance.

eric

Avophile

The short-coming reported in this thread was a let-down.

Let us know how it works out... I'll be doing a couple of these soon.

ericmedley

Just as a follow-up on what I found.

As you all know, there is already an AMX module for this device but it leaves a lot to be desired as far as feedback from the unit is concerned.

As it turns out, getting feedback from the unit is a big issue. I wrote a polling routine to harvest out the various states of the device. The protocol is pretty straight forward.

However, I found that the Niles piece is pretty flaky in giving back accurate data. the data would typically come back in the correct form. However, the values would change on each time round the poll. (Ex: a zone with a volume of 25 would report back with several different values on each pass although the volume hadn't changed on the system.) I tried increasing and decreasing the speed of the poll. Faster seemed to make it worse. Slower made it better but only marginally. I quit trying to slow down the poll at 8 seconds per zone.

Sending commands worked pretty well.

So, my conclusion is that it's a lot like IR control. You can count on it doing what you tell it to. Getting feedback is pretty iffy.

hope that helps.
ejm