We have been doing some work to get away from the Philips extenders and we have found the GC and a couple of IP to RS232 adaptors. We have coded it up and they seem to work very well (although we have only tested a fairly basic system so far). Just before I put these into a customer’s house has anyone had problems with using non Philips extenders with pronto?

Thanks,

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Mods: would this get a better responce in the Pronto forum? Can you move it please?

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Has no one got any experience with this?

Please....

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Why are you not wanting to use the Philips RFX9600 extenders? What equipment are you using? Remotes? Ect.? They work great "it's all in the programming" and setup. I have done large custom homes using multiple RFX9600s and multiple TSU9800s, TSU9600s and TSU9400s.

Hi,

I've used Pronto with Global Cache with few problems. The main gotchas are (1) the quality of your TCP socket handling code in the Pronto and (2) limited monitoring and logging capabilities on the GC.

It is really important that your socket handling code is good as you will need to ensure a device can be quickly reconnected to in the event of any disconnect. The TCP templates that Philips have provided in recent releases are very good starting points.

I have also found that the GC is a bit of a pain to work with if you do have a problem. For example I had a device that was not responding to every RS232 command in a stream of commands. It was very difficult to determine if I was firing data too quickly for the GC or the device without having the pain of looping back an RS232 input into another socket on the laptop. Improved logging capabilities in the GC would have been a big help.

The one advantage of using a GC over a standard Pronto extender is it makes integration with the device possible from other bits of kit. For example we have integrated AV with KNX so that when a room off switch is pressed on the wall then all the av can switched off as well.

HTH

jez

Well apart from having no hardware handshaking available (yes, you can still find devices that use HW handshaking), they have actually only 3 full two way rs-232 ports, without any trigging capability. If a device sends some info and then dies, no you can't do anything because, you did not poll it before it died (or whatever happened to it). And the rfx9600 is a one-task-only device, so you always have desynced actions even when you would like parralel executions. They work how they were made, but nothing more. And are quite pricy for what they provide. Wou get the more stuff with 2 CG-100-12's for a lower price. Haven't trid them myself yet but I'm planning to.

These are the main issues, I find them OK for 1 or 2 room systems, but once you add in 3 kids room, snug, kitchen and games rooms the RFX start showing there weaknesses....

We have started to introduce the GCs now into ‘real’ systems, so far so good…

Pigbite, thanks for the tips.

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