From: James Sentman <james-AT-sentman.com>
Date: 03 Jul 2009 07:23:30 UTC   (10:23:30 AM in author's locale)
To: xtensionlist-AT-shed.com

On Jul 3, 2009, at 10:07 AM, Jack Stewart wrote:

> When my security system sees an alarm condition, I want to control
> multiple PH508 Powerhorns and with X4X. These require a stream of
> turnon's and turnoff's to make them function. When I use X4X to send
> the on's and off's via a script I encounter two problems:
>
> 1) After a few seconds of transmission, X4X overloads with
> collision errors and locks up so that the only way I can stop it is
> to crash the X4X application. I don't know what would be the best
> scripting approach to solving this.


>
> 2) I am unable to break into X4X with, for example a unit change
> of state, while it is transmitting a series of on's and off's.
> Apparently any such continuous transmission must have programmed
> pauses in it to allow X4X to multi-task. What is the best way to do
> this?


Why are there collision errors? What else is transmitting? If XTension
receives a huge number of error messages it could possibly become
unresponsive while trying to handle them all, but it would have to be
a lot of errors, like tens to hundreds a second depending on the CPU
of the machine. I have seen this happen once or twice over the years
when a USB error has caused a single packet to be repeated a hundred
thousand times, but never just from a few errors from an interface.

I dont have any of these power horns, how do they work? You have to
keep sending them an on? How are you doing it now, if it's in a loop
in a script then thats the problem. You might want to do just a
repeating script like:

if (status of "name of powerhorn unit") is true then
turnon "name of powerhorn unit"
end if

and in the ON script of the powerhorn unit you'd do a

execute script "name of that global script" in 3

so when you turned on the powerhorn, in 3 seconds that script would
run, turn on the unit again sending another X10 command to keep it
runnig and reschedule the event to check again.

Then to stop it you'd just turn the unit off and when the script runs
it will do nothing since it checks the status first.

But you can't just loop in a script forever and expect the program to
do anything else while you're looping. The scripts must be single
threaded or the results of just about everything would turn to mush.
But perhaps I dont know how they work, send more info!

Thanks,
James

James Sentman sentman.com MacHomeAutomation.com


_______________________________________________
XTensionlist mailing list
XTensionlist-AT-shed.com
lists.shed.com/mailman/listinfo/xtensionlist