R4s Custom Events don't work
vining
Posts: 4,368
No matter what I try I just can't get the R4s to work with button queries/custom events. According to PI and the R4 programming manual the R4s should support the button queries but I can't seem to make it work. It must be on the to do list but if they're not supported yet don't publish that they are cuz there's nothing that pisses me off more than wasting my time trying to do something that the docs say I can do just to find out I can't and the reason I'm wasting my time is someone at AMX was too lazy or too cheap to write the docs with accurate info.
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My channels, as posted in another thread are 15, 20, 25, 26 which don't overlap with any wi-fi channels and there's no other 2.4ghz stuff on the job, heck this job still doesn't have any telephones installed. The microwave wasn't in use either. My gateways are reasonably close to their associated R4s and they seem to update fine when they do update. I haven't check the gateway's logs but I really don't think there's a latency issue and definitely not on ever R4, every gateway and then in my office.
If anyone has had success with this with R4s I'd gladly keep trying but right now I just don't think it's supported in the firmware and the documentation is just wrong. Of course I'd rather be wrong since my code is all written to handle this and I modified my existing code so I only update certain things after a reboot but now this only works on 1/2 my UI's. The TPs work fine but the R4 don't. I feel like I got all dressed up and now I have no where to go.
When I first started doing R4s I tried all the bells and whistles at first. But, some little voice in my head kept saying, "Don't show any of this to the designers.. Don't show any of this to the designers..." I'm glad I listened to that particular voice in my head because I found that many of the 'cool kids on the block' features would work with the remote sitting on my desk next to the gateway but would hiccup and fail in real life..
Consequently, my R4s are very simple designs that flat aren't that flashy. But, they seem to work pretty reliably.
It may well be that the remote's real operation does not match the manual. This is probably a good tech support call IMHO
I basically just want to ask it 1 question to determine if a reboot or file xfer has occurred since the last online event so I can ultimately send it less traffic when it comes online and eventually when it goes onto a particular device page. I'm really trying to do less not more.
The ?TXT command is really not different than ^TXT in that it receives the command to write text so it should recieve the query command to tell me what text is on a button but it just doesn't respond with anything which to means it probably doesn't understand the command because it's not supported in firmware.
edit: added
It probably would be a good thing to call into TS but I normally don't bother them plus I really don't think they'll give me a solution. Maybe they'll consider updating the firmware and make it possible in the next release but by then I'll have re-written the code and won't want to re-visit it. Besides even though I can call TS I'm still pissed at AMX about the whole BS program stuff.
I'm with you there brother...
One thing I've done to deal with feedback/status/etc... On the R4s is create a separate timeline that basically slows down all the feedback messages going out and actually slows down even more when the feedback pending buffer starts to get bigger. It has seemed to work for me. I realize there's a possibility that the client might catch it not being up-to-date but haven't gotten that phone call yet...
hmmm... I wonder how much of all my code in general is like this as well.