Over the summer, I did an upgrade job where an extremely old AMX system was replaced with Elan. The original company had closed there local office and retreated back to their main location in New Jersey when the housing market here slowed down. They do have a programmer living here who works remotely, but they have not been servicing clients consistently, so this particular customer was ready to scrap it all and start fresh.

There were shades, and only shades in the system on the Lutron side. It was a Homeworks series 4 processor and was controlled by the AMX controller via rs232. I had contacted the original installation company to see if they would cooperate and provide the necessary .XML file to make this work with Elan and got no response. I ended up being put in contact with a Homeworks dealer located about 3 hours away (closest one). They came and took a look, but the sales guy they sent had no idea, and scheduled to send their primary Lutron programmer when he came back to work after an injury.

When they finally returned, the primary tech was still out, so they sent another guy who had never even seen one of the old series 4 processors. After wasting a fair amount of time, it was determined that the original program file could not be extracted because it was corrupt, so he set about reprogramming the entire system from scratch. I'm fairly certain that their primary programmer also has very limited, if any, experience with Illuminations, so it may not have mattered which guy they sent. So, he reprograms the system, creates the necessary XML file for Elan, and we try it. It's been a couple months, so I don't recall exactly which errors Elan was reporting, but it appeared to be looking for keypads that don't exist. The original AMX system had no Lutron keypads. The shades were controlled on the same AMX keypads used to control the audio system. He made some changes and added phantom keypads, but Elan was still seeing invalid device IDs relating to keypads.

I'm quite frustrated at this point, but am somewhat stuck with these guys because they took out the one defective shade to order a replacement. So, I'll need them to fix the programming when they finally return with the replacement shade. What my question is, for those who know the Illuminations end of it, what do I need to specify him to do in the programming where Elan isn't going to find invalid device IDs looking for keypads (I assume) that don't exist?

I do have a copy of the XML file, but not the actual Illuminations file, if looking at that could be of any help. I'd like to resolve this as quickly as I can, but I have a feeling I'm going to need to just get the shade that was defective back from them and find another Homeworks dealer (probably from 4 freaking hours away from here) to come in and do the job right.

Thanks

Is this job in WV?

It is, indeed

Are you trying to do the import from Illumination to g!, because that never worked right.

When I was still doing ELAN I would program a Lutron keypad button with every load in the house. Pressing the button would cause the g! system to recognize all of the load and KP feedback and populate the g! side accordingly. Since you don't have any keypads, that is not an option.

You need the Lutron programmer to give you a Control Station Engraving report or Phantom Keypad Engraving report. Each report will give you the address of the keypads and the names of each button. Then you manually add the keypad in g!.

Or you can trial and error your way and manually add all 32 possible keypads. They would be 1:6:1 through 1:6:32.

The addresses of the individual shades would be a bit trickier depending on the complexity of the system. But, if you figure out the keypad buttons, the feedback should automatically add the individual shades in g!.

I followed the integration notes to the letter, but really didn't have high expectations that it would go as smoothly as indicated. I had them program the Lutron processor, export as an XML file, added it into Elan, uploaded the XML (via the read config file button in Elan). I was expecting it to, as indicated by the integration notes, auto populate everything smoothly. As you can see, smoothly was not how it went.

Illuminations XML is not quite the same as QS or Ra2.. It was something that was thrown into Illuminations towards the end and never quite finished before Lutron shit canned it and went over to QS.

Doesn't Elan have a regular old Lutron Homeworks module where you can just enter the keypad and button number? Illuminations works just the same as the older Homeworks as far as rs232 strings and addressing go. In AMX I could program that command in a single line of code.