Detecting when a device boots up
Although Audia and Nexia are designed to be always on, we’ve seen several installs where the customer requires the ability to power down the entire rack from the control system. The challenge, when powering back on, is how to let the control system know when the unit (or units) are back on-line. Certainly, the control system could be looking for the welcome message the unit sends when it powers up or it could be set to poll a parameter from the system until it gets a response. This article shows a more elegant way to achieve this using logic signals.
NOTE: This only works if the control system is connected to the RS232 port of one device in the system.
Single unit
- Add a Logic State block, A Logic Delay block, a Remote Preset block and a Command String block to your configuration.
- Connect the output of the Logic State to both, the Command String block and the Logic Delay block.
- Connect the output of the Logic Delay block to the Remote Preset block.
- Double-click the Logic State block and turn it on.
- Open the preset dialog by going to Presets and selecting Create/Edit/Recall.
- If your system has a power up default preset, recall this preset and add the Logic State. If not, create a new preset to control the Logic State block. This preset needs to be set as a power up default. For more info on creating presets, see this article.
- Create a second preset and add the Logic State to it.
- In the Logic State dialog, turn off the Logic State.
- Save the preset and close the preset dialog.
- Double-click on the Remote Preset block and assign the second preset to this button
- Double-click on the Command String block and set the command to be sent to the control system when the unit powers up.
Multi unit
Doing this on a multi-unit system is a bit trickier as we depend on at least one unit, the one connected to the control system, to send the command string to the control system. If that unit doesn't boot up, nothing will be sent to the control system.
- Add one Logic State block per unit in your configuration. Each of these blocks would need to fixed into a different unit.
- Add an AND Gate where all the Logic State blocks will connect to. The output of the AND Gate should be connected to a Logic Delay block and a Remote Preset block shown below
- Create a preset to turn on all the Logic State blocks and set it to power up default
- Create a second preset to reset all Logic State blocks
Please note that the command string will only go out of the RS-232 port of the unit to which the Command String block is assigned to (in the screenshot above, it will be sent from the RS-232 port of unit 4).