Elk lighting issue

[Steve]

I was going to make a long post about an issue I was having that was driving me absolutely crazy for at least a month. I thought my UPB stuff was acting up but I could not find any real issues with it (after years of working great). I finally had a big block of time where I was able to do alot of troubleshooting. The symptoms were some rules did not fire correctly (some lights not going on/off as supposed to) and lights not responding correctly to rules triggered direct from 8 button controller. The bizarre part was that the M1 went thru all the motions (strings showing up properly in SDK, the CIM flashing/reacting as tho it did indeed put command on the powerline) but lights did not work. But, if a button was configured to directly send links then all worked fine (taking M1 out of the picture and just using UPB). I tried firmware upgrades and downgrades, 3 CIMS, etc etc.

Then, I happened to be chatting/PM with Wayne and told him what I was doing. After a while he sent me a quote from the Elk forum that I did not think would make a difference, and BAM - all of the sudden everything started to work as normal again.

So, this is a warning to anyone doing lighting with X10 or XSP with the M1. Here is a quote from this post.

Hi Matt, What type of lighting is your ELK-M1 interfaced with? If you are using a M1XSP or X-10 for lighting you should not enable the 'OPT' (under lighting in ELK-RP) feature for lighting. Especially if your rules control multiple devices at one time. This 'OPT' feature is intended for interfacing to lighting systems that communicate over the high speed serial port (port 0) or the M1XEP Ethernet module. For example the ISY from Universal Devices. Regards, Don Lamb ELK Products

This is something that was changed in recent firmware updates which is about when my stuff started acting weird. I was still on RP .22 and my column is labeled 'Future', not 'Opt'. I can't say whether all my items were checked before and the M1 just ignored that column until recently, or if some update actually checked all my lights, but I unchecked all the lights and then everything started working fine!

So, if you start to have weird issues with your lighting on the XSP, especially with rules controlling multiple lights, then make sure your 'Future' or 'Opt' column is all unchecked.

Hopefully this will save someone the many hours of frustration is caused me. And thanks again to Wayne to pointing me to it.

 

[Photon]

I don't have an M1XSP, and my lighting is exclusively X10. I don't have the "OPT" field checked. I like to dim some of the lights when they come on to save energy and extend bulb life.

I finally got the lights to behave by NOT issuing multiple commands from a single rule. I have some lights that go on and dim a few steps whenever time is sunset, and I now offset each rule by some time, with one X10 address per rule. Rule 6 is the only one that controls two devices, and it is only reliable if I do the TURN OFF command before the DIM command. I guess the Elk doesn't wait for a dim commmand to finish before it goes on to the next THEN.

WHENEVER THE TIME IS 30 MINUTES BEFORE SUNSET
THEN ANNOUNCE Say Time (vm238)
THEN DIM Den Lamp [37 (C5)] BY 6 STEPS
 4 
WHENEVER THE TIME IS 5 MINUTES BEFORE SUNSET
THEN DIM Living Rm Lamp [33 (C1)] BY 2 STEPS
 5 
WHENEVER THE TIME IS 1 MINUTE BEFORE SUNSET
THEN DIM Gar Outside Lt [39 (C7)] BY 6 STEPS
 6 
WHENEVER SUNSET
THEN TURN Plant Light [34 (C2)] OFF
THEN DIM MBR Lamp [36 (C4)] BY 12 STEPS