Lighting Control Solution

SMCSI

I have a future project that requires whole house lighting and one thing I really like to provide is sliders for individual circuit control. The problem I've had in the past (using Homeworks) was the speed at which the Lutron side gave feedback.

Maybe it was my programming, but I couldn't get a smooth slider working. I had to send the desired light level to the Homeworks after the user had moved the slider to the desired position. Homeworks would then update the circuit lighting level (0-100%). It also meant the user didn't see the actual light intensity change until they had effectively set the light level. I'm not using the Duet module.

What I really want is a slider where the user moves the slider up or down and the light level changes with the slider movement. Is this possible with Homeworks? If not, is it possible with Vantage or other whole home systems?

Thanks in advance,
Steve

DHawthorne

Homeworks dimmers only spit out the end state, not the intermediate states. Dragging a level control might produce multiple end states, but I don't see a way to avoid that output being staggered. I would put feedback on one control, and actual control on a different slider; let the feedback one catch up and put some debounce code in there so it doesn't jerk around so much.

SMCSI

Yeah, that's very similar to a method I tried. It's very sluggish and looks bad (well the way I did it anyway).

Even without feedback on the touchpanel, the ability to simulate going to a wall dimmer and sliding the dimmer would be really nice as it's a natural thing to do. You see the effect of your actions straight away, rather than a slight delay. Is it possible my comms are sluggish, it seems to take Homeworks about a second to send the final dimming state. (User presses a raise button which sends raisedim and then stopdim on release)

Ta

TurnipTruck

I use the UPB dimming system on many of my installs. See www.pulseworx.com for more info. I have a module that I sell that makes UPB relatively easy to work with.

The sample UI has active touch bargraphs that work like sliders. When you touch the active bargraph, the dimmer goes to the level at which you touch the bargraph and the bargraph displays that level. There is about a 300mS delay after sending a level to a dimmer before another can be sent, which is what keeps it from being a true slider action. It is about as close as you can get to true slider action without using something like Radias and connected levels. What's also nice is that manual changes at the wall dimmers are reflected on the bargraphs.

The UPB system is a world more flexiable than Grafik Eyes and offers much better feedback.

I have attched my UPB module documentation if you would like to read more about it.

vining

I just played with my bar graph which is set up as Level Function "active". I have my active touch bar graph (invisible) on top of my display bargraph (visible). I never thought of touching and sliding because just touching where I what the level to be seems quicker and simpler, however I tried touching and sliding and it works pretty good. A little jerky but I can't imagine it getting any smoother. It might be the way you're parsing and doing feedback that might need tweeking. If you want smoother feedback you might have to handle this feeback right from your parser.

I just checked my code and I'm handling this feedback it in a 200 ms timeline with all my general feedback so I might be able to make it smother if I wanted but since the sliding feels awkward to me and the sliding feedback already seems fine I'll leave it as it is.

TurnipTruck

The delay in my case is the message handling by the dimming system.