Posted: January 20 2004 at 11:18 | IP Logged

Hi there,

What can I do, X10 wise and/or PH wise, to handle missed messages? I have motion sensors in all my bathrooms and closets, when you walk in, the light comes on, after you leave and there is no more motion, the light goes off.

Sometimes however, the PH never sees the ON or sometimes never sees the OFF. The off is the problem since that burns electricity wastefully. I have checked the event logs, and PH never got (or at least recorded) an OFF message from the motion sensor. I find this happens more often when my computer is busy doing other work like controlling my DVR that is recording from my XCAM's when motion is detected in front of the house, the driveway, etc. But that could just be coincidence and perhaps something else is colliding with the message making it to where it never makes it to PH?

Is there some code I could write when the motion sensor triggers an ON that would set an automatic OFF trigger if the trigger is not deleted by the time it fires (say ON time+5 minutes)? Or change something in my X10 setup?

My X10 setup is the WF800RF32 (with the external antenna), 3 repeaters in the house to get whole house coverage (one set to A, one to B, and the 3rd to C so there are no conflicts there).

If I can get this stuff to work consistently, my wife will love me, if not, she will make me rip it all out and then I don't have a 'toy' in my PH/X10 system to play with anymore!

Help!

Robert

Posted: January 20 2004 at 12:04 | IP Logged

Robert,

Its probably not that the system is too busy.  The COM port object that PowerHome is using has a 2048 byte interrupt driven receive buffer.  Even if the computer is too busy to process the command, the command should not be lost as it would be in the buffer and would eventually get processed.

What I found to be a problem in my own situation is RF signal collision.  I have a number of motion detectors spread throughout the house and also use three palm pads very frequently (they control everything....changing channels on the satellite, turning lights on/off, volume, etc.).  If it were just me in the house, I almost never have any problems.  But when multiple people are walking around the house and Im trying to change channels on the TV, I encounter problems where signals are lost.  Even though you may have different equipment on different housecodes, they all share the same frequency.  Different housecodes, etc. only mean different bit patterns.

You could easily put together some code to automatically turn a light off 5 minutes after the last motion was sensed.  The way I would do it is have a trigger for the motion sensor "On" command.  The action of this trigger would fire a macro that would turn the light on and then wait 5 minutes.  After the wait command would be the appropriate "off" command.  Now if the macro is waiting and another "On" command from the motion sensor comes in, the trigger would fire the macro again.  The very first part of the macro should check to see if it is already waiting (ph_ismacrowaiting).  If it is, then extend the macro wait time by 5 minutes (ph_extendmacrowait) and then exit.  If it wasnt waiting, then you would execute the code to turn the light on.  If you need me to, I can type the macro up for you exactly.  Otherwise, the psuedo-code is below:

1. Check if macro is waiting.

2. If waiting, then extend macro wait time 5 minutes and exit.

3. Turn light on.

4. Wait 5 minutes.

5. Turn light off.

Hope this helps,

Dave.

Posted: January 27 2004 at 22:34 | IP Logged

Robert,

See the reply I did to your WF Post. Had the same problem when getting extraneous RF signals ....

SA