HouseBot

I have written a script like the sample in the help that ramps up a light over a period of time. The switch is a Leviton that responds to the Leviton Dim Level commands and the interface is the Powerlinc. I have noticed that it appears to take about five seconds to transmit each command.



This seems like a *really* long time and makes it tough to do things like ramping up a light over two or three minutes since a five second interval will take over eight minutes to go from 0 to 100. Does anyone have an idea of how fast a Powerlinc transmission typically takes? Does this behavior seem normal?



EDIT: in troubleshooting this a bit more, here is what *appears* to be happening although this makes no sense. The rest of the switches in my house are PCS and they have an LED that blinks whenever X-10 activity occurs. When I used a button that does +=1 or -=1 to set the Preset Dim Level on a PCS switch and pushed it repeatedly it appeared to take less than one second per command.



When I did the same thing on a button mapped to the Leviton Dim Level on this Leviton switch the activity LED showed *three* tranmisssions (each about one second apart) followed by a one second pause. I only pushed it *once* and this sequence of events occurred. I had this property mapped to a gauge so then I held it for a bit so the repeat would kick in. The same events occurred like clockwork and during each sequence of events the value on the gauge only increased by one.



-- Dave

Dave,



To simplify things, if you just manually set the Leviton Dim value from the HouseBot server UI, do you see the same delay?



Also, maybe the PowerLinc thinks its having a problem sending the Leviton Dim. What happens if you set the X10 Retries property of the PowerLinc to 0 or 1?

Hi Scott,



Making the change from the server UI produces the same results. I had already tried reducing the retries from 5 to 2 with no effect. I just tried reducing retries to 0 and still no effect - strange! If there are any logs or traces I can generate to help just let me know...



-- Dave

dlmorgan999 wrote:If there are any logs or traces I can generate to help just let me know...

I think a Hardware Interface of the Powerlinc would be a good place to start. To generate a trace file:

1. Select the Powerlinc Hardware Interface from the Tree View.
2. Click on the 'Hardware Module Type' button at the top of the Interface Property list.
3. Click on the 'Enabled' checkbox to turn on tracing.
4. Try and use the interface again. This should generate data in the log file.
5. Turn the tracing off by clearing the 'Enabled' checkbox set previously.
6. Send the trace file (InterfaceTrace.*.csv) to me at '[email protected]'. The file can be found in the HouseBot\Logs directory.