X10 Community Forum
🔌General Home Automation => Automating Your House => Troubleshooting Automation Problems => Topic started by: aslamma on August 07, 2008, 01:03:25 PM
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I seem to have a very reliable PLC setup and my RF range is very good. But what I cannot figure out is how to consistently get the stick-a-switch (slimline switches) to reliably send commands. Sometimes just a light tap will send the trigger, other times it will not. If I press and hold it for about 1-2 seconds, it will always work. The other problem is that the macro exectution delay makes me wonder if it has executed or not.
So I end up pressing the switch, waiting to see if it worked. Then I press and hold it (hopefully less than the 3 seconds or it will go into another mode) and then wait again because of the delay. It is pretty cheesey and often times very frustrating.
Is there a better way to do this, or even another product? I would like to have something that "snaps" with touch rather than the mushy (and unreliable) feel of the stick-a-switches. But it has to be able to stick on the wall and look pretty decent (so no palm pads).
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aslamma,
If you have overcome the RF range limitations of the CM15a, the major part of the battle is over.
SlimSwtiches and Palmpads are notorious for producing multiple RF transmissions. If you are using the CM15a for reception (I assume you are from your previous posts on the antenna mod), you'll may need some "special handling" to deal with these repeated transmissions.
Prior to getting into this in depth - a few questions:
1) Are you using the CM15a or a transceiver for the SlimSwtich?
2) Are you using macro's to execute your On/off sequences?
3) Do you have your housecode set to not transceive?
4) Do you have SmartMacros?
The following assumes that all of the above are true.
Step 1 - Verify that you are receiving the RF from the switch. The next time that your lights fail to respond, check the AHP activity monitor to see if the CM15a registered the RF transmission. If you see multiple RF receipts and your lights didn't turn on, you may have a "re-entrant" problem (step 2). If you don't see the RF reception - well I guess that's rather obvious.
Step 2 - If you have Smartmacros, add a flag to prevent the multiple transmissions from re-starting the macro. Add a delay (1-2 second as shown). The delay may seem counterproductive, but it will allow time for the CM15a to recover from being bombarded by the multiple RF transmissions.
Macro XX ON
Trigger if XX on and Flag XX off
Set Flag XX ON
Delay 1
Set module XX on
Delay XX
Set module XX off
Set Flag XX Off
If possible, please post a copy of your macro.
Boiler
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Hey Boiler...thanks for the help. I looked in AHP at the receive commands and I think a major portion of it was the lag experienced when executing a macro.
I can see the slimswitch immediately send the command, but there is quite a delay until AHP starts sending commands out. I think I mistook as a send error on the slimswitch end, but really it is just that I am impatient. It was behaving well during my recent test, I will have to keep an eye out for it though.