A few questions

English
1

Hello,
I just receives my first velbus modules and I’m happy to say that it looks really good at first sight.
But now I’ve got a few questions:

  1. I’m contolling the bus at the moment directly with visuall basic (no .net) because the velbuslink soft doesn’t start in server mode. What I do is send a bus activ message, the data (like a pushbutton press) and at last a bus off message. I don’t know if this is the normal way to do so? Is it neccesary to send a bus off message and always a bus active message (without the modules won’t respond)?

  2. I was browsing thrue the download directories and saw some article in Italian. It is that my Italian level is below zero and understand not half of the articles but I get the base of them. The question about them: they use hardware handshaking with the serial module (dtr, rts), how do the bus responds to this? Does it sends a bus active, bus off? I’d like to know this because this is very interresting to make a microcontroller talk to the bus and make my own apps.

  3. Is there any chance that there will be a dimmer extension (slave dimmer) or a dimmer that can handle a bit more power than 300w?

ok I’ve got more questions, but let’s have a start with those.

2

You serial port settings should be:

  • Baud rate: 38400
  • Parity scheme: no parity
  • Number of stop bits: 1
  • The number of bits in the bytes transmitted and received: 8
  • DTR (data-terminal-ready) flow control: disabled
  • RTS (request-to-send) flow control: enabled

You don’t need to send any special messages to start communicating with the modules. Just note that you need to respect a 50-60ms interval between each packet that you send, otherwise you will flood the system and you will receive a ‘Bus off’ and/or a ‘Receive buffer full’ message.

The best place to start is by sending a ‘Module type request’ command to the address of a module (or to all possible addresses, and see who responds). Make sure your packet is well-formed (checksum, priority bits, etc etc).

Good luck and have fun