Hello,
Recently I bought some Velbus modules in order to experiment Velbus system on PC, in fact the possibility of interaction with PC makes the Velbus system very attractive, making it possible to virtually do anything that passes by your creative mind, also as a whole I found Velbus system very flexible, adaptable, reliable and despite everything simple making it in a product of success.
At moment I’m sketching some .NET code for Velbus, and some ideas and questions began to arise.
1 - VMB4PD this control panel as anyone knows is very limited, after all you have only 2 lines of 16 characters, and off course if you try to do some real time custom menus through .NET code, quickly you will find some trouble because any simple menu certainly will hold more than 2 lines of 16 characters, given this the only alternative is trying to create some kind of scrolling text, however final result isn´t very satisfactory due to a slow display method, I believe is related with write memory data or Velbus bus speed.
2 – After some time studding Velbus packet I found that it´s allocated one byte to store all the Velbus commands, this means that there are only 255 available send and receive command interactions against ± 84 already taken.
3 – All Velbus Modules that deal with power drain Ex. “VMB1DM “, “VMB1RY “, “VMB4RY”, etc…, Should have some kind of feature “Power Load Monitor” something that reports how many power in Watts is being consumed in the exact moment. However to avoid bus congestion, this data should only be sent when a request is made or the value have changed for a certain percentage and an amount of time. Ex.5% for a second.
Ex. 1000W = Present power load
1000W*5% = 50W
if 1000W changed to 949W or 1051W and stayed changed for more than a second then send Power Value to Velbus bus.
Off course when I say 5% for a second is just an example, this values should be studied by Velbus engineers.
Nowadays this kind of feature “Power Load control” will help systems such as Velbus making sense, creating homes environmentally friendly and energy efficient .
4 – Another important feature is lighting related, today we see more LED lighting systems than ever especially ones where I believe that is the future, called RGB LEDs or Arrays of RGB LEDs, I have been investigating and is understandable such demand, because not only is light intensity controlled ”dimmable” but also spectrum color controlled “color controlled” , allied the fact that is energy efficient. There are a lots of systems “LED controllers or LED drivers” in the market based on DMX or RDM protocol that can handle such task, however none of them has the ability to be easily driven, integrated and computer controlled like in Velbus system, would be nice creating an RGB controller module similar to dimmer module but for LEDs control, with a dimming function and selectable output of 12V/24V ± 180/300W and independent color channel control R / G / B .
I hope my contribution would be very handy, helping Velbus System to grow and becoming a standard industry .
Greetings to all and good work.
, what I mean is all available commands that operates velbus modules “Byte5”, I will describe in brief how the velbus packet is made:
Having an open API would be heaven! 
