Hi All,

I have a couple of T3's a U1 and a T4 controlling most of the entertainment gear of my own house. I have 3 x RM433's scattered throughout the house feeding back to the RP-6.

Everything works fine. In the living room i have a plasma on the wall with an IR-mitter stuck to the front of the panel.

As the wife was struggling with feedback from the T3 to indicate she had actually hit volume up/channel up etc I decided to put a visible IR-mitter on the plasma so it would flash when using the remote. This works as you would expect giving a blast of visible red light whenever macro's are invoked.

The interesting thing is the IR-mitter will randomly flash as if its spitting out IR. This seems to happen more in the evening, but does occur thoughout the day as well. To help track it down I reprogrammed the RP6 to only send IR data out the relavent port (instead of all ports). The problem remained.

As a test i removed everything from the RP6 except for control of the plasma (ie. no other macros/control in the project). Flickering still occurs.

Then I noticed that operating my garage door remote makes the IR flash. I checked the specs and it runs at 433MHz. So i watched the rm433 whilst hitting the garage remote - sure enough its indicating data (green light).

Now that's all fine, i understand that you're going to get some stray signals being picked up on the rm433. What i don't get is why is the RP6 is sending it on as a macro output via an IR port? Surely there's some kind or CRC or something being sent when an RF macro is triggered from a remote?

More puzzling is which macro is being sent? The plasma certainly isn't responding to the commands which leads me to believe its either bad or random data.

Anyone else come across this? An obvious solution is to simply go back to a non visible IR-mitter, but i'd prefer to understand what's going on first :)

Also I'm wondering if changing the ID of the RP6 might help. Who knows, maybe one of my neighbours has RTI gear too...

Thanks,
Matt.

I would try this first. Or maybe recode the garage door to a different channel if it's possible.

Garage remote isn't changable. But worse, its not just me that's triggering the IR flashing. I'm certain neighbours are causing it too as it gets a lot more frequent in the evenings (as in when most people get home and start channel surfing).

What you are seeing is not an IR code or trigger command. The blink emitter flashers are responding to voltage on the line but not the actual IR transmission. The RP6 will pass this 'carrier' voltage through to all ports but the actual IR signal will only pass on the ports specified. You will notice this if you hook up blink emitters to all of the ports. They will all flash.

It is deceiving... the blink emitters are not actually showing you IR... just status that something is happening electrically.

Well that makes sense. So short answer is either put up with the random flashing or swap it out to a normal one.

So is it likely the flashing is caused by induced voltage (perhaps due to other signals in nearby cables) or would it be activity from the RP6?

Either way, thank you for the explanation.

I have not actually tested the electrical properties but from what I understand, I would assume that the 433 RF interference is causing a voltage response from the RM433 and that this response is just passing through the RP6 and showing on the blink emitter. I have always assumed it to be a threashold issue (the blink flasher resonds to very little signal present) but I imagine someone else may know better than I.

I heard it slightly differently from Groovit, as a voltage that is sent out at the beginning of anything sent out. So a macro with two commands would give you three blinks, for instance. And if the receiver picks up a 433 mHz signal, it might flash to indicate it's received a signal (hey, maybe that's what it is, anyway -- receipt of a signal) but then send out nothing because there's nothing to send.

The reason we try to chase down and eliminate stuff like this is that if the receiver picks up that signal at the same instant that it picks up a signal from the remote, the remote signal won't (may not) work that time. If the light blinks often, you have more likelihood of problems.

I have seen the same types of reactions when the emitter wires were touching a form of electrical or wifi type of wiring. All my emitters would randomly flash and the system would exhibit a slower response behavior which was fustrating.

I relocated the network switch in the equipment rack to another vantage point and removed all contact with wiring. Something like that might be happening.

First off, changing to a non-blink emitter isn't going to help I don't think. You just won't be able to see the interference, but it will still be generated. Plus, non-blink emitters are actually "hotter" than the blink type, so it could get worse.

One (important) thing to check is that the "IR Passthrough" setting on the RP6 is shut off on at least your plasma output. Go the the RP6 device properties page. That will prevent "spurious" interference that may be picked up on your RM433 wiring from being passed through to the RP6 outputs.

Dino

I had a flasher/flashers that would start flashing randomly and would after a while would lock up the rp-6. After many trips to the clients home moving equipment around replaceing this and that, when I replaced the RM-433 antenna and the problem went away.

Open up closest RM-433, pull out the green LED and solder some wire to it and relocate the green LED to your TV :)

What's the purpose of this?


The RM-433 is an RF receiver, and if you extend any internal wiring, you will be adding random antenna-like components to it. This extension might cause reception problems, even if you're just telling us to move the power indicator.