Lutron Homeworks Saving Custom Scenes from AMX?

shr00m-dew

Took over a job that a different company couldn't complete. Customer has Lutron Homeworks, all RF system. Running 1.33 over serial.

We use Vantage and I had never fooled with Homeworks before. I'm using the standard AMX module 2.3.

I've got everything working, with full dimming support of each load with feedback just like we do with Vantage. One thing we typically do with Vantage, that I'm not seeing an easy way to do with HWI. Saving of custom scenes.

IE, every page of lights has a few learnable scene buttons and the whole house page has 6 learnable scenes. Typically hit the button to turn that scene on, hold button to save the levels of all lights in that group and edit the name. In Vantage this is easily accomplished by using a phantom button with all affected loads set to a learnable dim. Hold the phantom button for X seconds and the new levels are learned.

I've found a similar option in Homeworks, but it appears the communication protocol doesn't allow you to fully emulate a buttton. Vantage supports a push-only and release-only of phantom buttons, if you wait 5 seconds between a PO and the RO, Vantage acts like you've held the button for 5 seconds. Homeworks lets you trigger each phantom step with a push, hold, and release, but it seems that's just triggering the programming associated with those steps not actually 'holding' the button. I don't see a way to virtually hold a phantom button and allow the built in scene saving to work.

Since I was tracking all the levels, I wound up just saving them into an array when the button was held. Just a push/release would then go through a FOR loop commanding each load to go the saved level. That's just hokey and with the combination of RS232 and RF dimmers takes a long time (up to a minute) for all loads to get to the correct level. Customer winds up thinking it didn't work and hitting the button again (or a different scene) backing up the command queue even more.

Anyone know of a way to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Last resort is to use an unused 8 button Lutron keypad for setting the whole house cutoms scenes, and just have the touchpanels toggle those.

Thanks,

Kevin D.

HARMAN_icraigie

Can be a bit convoluted to implement but Lutron's Scene Saver will do what you are looking to do. I have used a separate "programming" keypad that references the same scenes as the "operational" keypad. Programming separate raise/lower buttons aot enabling cycle/dim on the scene buttons simplifies things somewhat for the programmer but not the end-user.

shr00m-dew

Well, I was searching the HWI help file to quote a passage about why that wouldn't work, and stumbled on direct RS232 commands for saving the Scene Saver levels to a button.

Should do what I need it to do. Using scene saver within HWI itself requires a button to be held for 4 seconds which you can't do from AMX. But using the direct RS232 commands, I should be able to send:

SSB (begin saver mode)
KBSS 'button' (save levels to button)
SST (stop saver mode)

All on the hold of an AMX button.

If that works, the only other possible problem I see is that the help file says you cannot save levels to off. So if I do a whole house scene saver, he'll have to sent loads he wants off to 1% before he saves it??

Kevin D.