johnnynine said:
One question in regards to the link table in the master and secondary z-wave controllers... What happens when you add a device to your home? Do you need to add the device to the master controller and then recopy the link table to the secondary controller?
There are four ways to deal with this. It's actually a pretty ingenious system for portable remotes, and it works well with others as well.
Option 1: Simple setup
With portable remotes, you can generally only control devices if they're in a scene or assigned to a button, etc. If you have a remote in your bedroom, and you add a device in your living room with the master remote--but you don't need to control that device from your bedroom--you just keep on using the bedroom remote. You only have to update the controller if you need to control a device it doesn't know about. This is kind of a graceful fallback type scenario.
Option 2: Copying configuration
For those of us who would like to always have all routes available to our remotes, not waste time trying to route through old (removed/replaced) devices, or be able to control all devices from every remote, we can simply replicate (copy) from the primary to the slaves. For PC control, where it's not the master controller (and not running under option 3 or 4), you'll generally want to copy your master over to your PC whenever you make changes.
Option 3: Using stationary controller as synced network backup
With newer remotes, you can set up a stationary controller (like a USB stick plugged into your desktop, or some in-wall zone controllers) as a backup for network configuration and routing data. In Z-Wave parlance this is called SUC (or Static Update Controller). Your primary will automatically propogate changes to the network to the SUC in real-time (or later, if it's out of range), and your other controllers can automatically wake up from time to time to get network updates--or can do it on the fly when they need the data.
Option 4: Using stationary controller as central controller
With newer remotes, you can also set up a stationary controller (like a USB stick plugged into your desktop, or some in-wall zone controllers) as the Primary controller in your network. All other remotes become Inclusion controllers and can add/remove devices (except for older remotes, which can't add/remove devices)--and all remotes can still wake up from time to time and sync changes. Under this scenario, you do need to be within range of an existing Z-Wave device to add another one. In Z-Wave paralance, this option is called SIS (or SUC Identification Server)
Under both option 3 and 4, by the way, if you're using your PC as the SUC or SIS, you'll get real-time network updates in both the Z-Wave PC SDK and in ThinkEssentials. It's pretty cool--you can add devices with your remote and they'll show up automagically in the interface. Watch for this with some of the new remotes coming to market...
In the end, the flexibility of the system allows people to run a system with no central coordinator, or with a central coordinator. Like ad-hoc networking vs. using access points, this gives quite a bit of flexibility to market applications and usage scenarios.
Chris
