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Good grief... who would sign up for such a thing? The biggest lighting system I worked on was Philips Dynalite. It's a gigantic RS-485 bus - you just make sure

Good grief... who would sign up for such a thing? The biggest lighting system I worked on was Philips Dynalite. It's a gigantic RS-485 bus - you just make sure all the dimmers and light switch panels are on the segment. It can be over a kilometre long and you can control/reprogram everything from everywhere on that bus. The protocol is simple enough that you can bit-bang subsets of it from dumb devices. Do recommend.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
Simple engineering rule applies here... “if you can run a wire, run a wire”. Notice over the whole article he talks about the how, but not really the why?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I have a wifi access point in the house to supplement the lan, and so I don't have to use the data plan for my phone. The durned thing needs to be power cycled now and then. No way I'm putting the lights on wifi. The wired lan is 10x more reliable, but even it needs the router rebooted. (I've had lots of routers. All needed rebooting.) Never had to reboot the lights or the power sockets.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    Do you think there's something inherent about forwarding packets or beaming WiFi that make devices unreliable or have you considered the possibility that purchasing a more expensive device might resolve these issues for you? MikroTik routers a good for the price, WiFi is decent. Ubiquity APs are good for their price, WiFi is about as good as it gets. HP ProCurve switches has been to space. You could use any device that runs Linux to DYI these things. Though you need one 2ghz and one 5ghz NIC in the device acting AP. Since i started working IT 5 years ago and got some gear from work I've never had to reboot my device because it stopped functioning though I have scheduled automatic software updates checking (and installing if available) every day at 5am which implies automatic reboots every once in awhile.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      IMO x86(_64) machines running a standard Linux distro with ath9k/ath10k cards is the way to go. Embedded access points are crappy, and loading OpenWRT on them just makes them crappy in different ways. I'm sure enterprise gear is better than the consumer stuff on average, but it's still painting myself into a corner. In a similar vein, it pains me to hear people complain about SD issues with Raspberry Pis. My Kodi terminal will die occasionally due to SD card issues, and the only local disk usage it does is booting and the occasional dist-upgrade. The things are meant to be cheap and accessible, not reliable. If you're setting up a server in which you will be investing your time, an RPi is the wrong tool for the job.
      - carlhjerpe 6y ago
        The filesystem (ext4) should handle power failures just fine, so a more expensive SD card might do you well. There's a reason some are 5x the price of the cheap ones.
        mindslight 6y ago
        A better SD card would be more expensive. But that doesn't mean if I buy a more expensive SD card it will be better. I've already been using name brand consumer ones like Samsung EVO+. And I don't have the patience to dig through spec sheets on Digikey to see which ones purport to handle power loss gracefully and then do web research to find out if they actually live up to that claim. My next use of RPis (security cameras) will just use SD to load the kernel/initrd, and then run from nfsroot. BTW this hasn't been a once a month problem, maybe once a year. But once a year is still too often for me, as I would assume it would be for anyone who relied on one to control their lights.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I've bought multiple access points, they all required rebooting. My HD TV requires rebooting once every couple weeks or so. Also my Roku box. Also the cable modem. My Grace Digital media server. Every damned thing I own that has a computer in it needs rebooting now and then. Including my Windows and Linux boxen. Or they just slowly grind down, likely from not doing a good job cleaning up unused resources.
  - somehnguy 6y ago
    Stop buying consumer networking devices and the reboot problem goes away. Last I checked my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X uptime was just over 2 years. 0 issues. Same with the Unifi APs I use in my house.
    - bmurphy1976 6y ago
      I have to reboot at least one of our Ubiquiti switches each month on our office network. I'm very skeptical of Ubiquiti hardware. We had similar problems with their access points and swapped to them out for Cisco Merakis. I don't recall ever having to reboot our Meraki access points or firewall.
afandian 6y ago
Is this much different to DMX?
- michaelt 6y ago
  DMX is a one-way single-master bus. That means you can't have multiple light switches on the same network without quite a bit of complexity, you can't detect what's on the network, you can't update firmware or do device setup over the network, and so on. In stage applications that's not a problem because all the light switches are in one place - the lighting desk - and the lighting guy there can see all the lights at the same time.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago

Simple engineering rule applies here... “if you can run a wire, run a wire”. Notice over the whole article he talks about the how, but not really the why?

WalterBright 6y ago
I have a wifi access point in the house to supplement the lan, and so I don't have to use the data plan for my phone. The durned thing needs to be power cycled now and then. No way I'm putting the lights on wifi. The wired lan is 10x more reliable, but even it needs the router rebooted. (I've had lots of routers. All needed rebooting.) Never had to reboot the lights or the power sockets.
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  Do you think there's something inherent about forwarding packets or beaming WiFi that make devices unreliable or have you considered the possibility that purchasing a more expensive device might resolve these issues for you? MikroTik routers a good for the price, WiFi is decent. Ubiquity APs are good for their price, WiFi is about as good as it gets. HP ProCurve switches has been to space. You could use any device that runs Linux to DYI these things. Though you need one 2ghz and one 5ghz NIC in the device acting AP. Since i started working IT 5 years ago and got some gear from work I've never had to reboot my device because it stopped functioning though I have scheduled automatic software updates checking (and installing if available) every day at 5am which implies automatic reboots every once in awhile.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    IMO x86(_64) machines running a standard Linux distro with ath9k/ath10k cards is the way to go. Embedded access points are crappy, and loading OpenWRT on them just makes them crappy in different ways. I'm sure enterprise gear is better than the consumer stuff on average, but it's still painting myself into a corner. In a similar vein, it pains me to hear people complain about SD issues with Raspberry Pis. My Kodi terminal will die occasionally due to SD card issues, and the only local disk usage it does is booting and the occasional dist-upgrade. The things are meant to be cheap and accessible, not reliable. If you're setting up a server in which you will be investing your time, an RPi is the wrong tool for the job.
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      The filesystem (ext4) should handle power failures just fine, so a more expensive SD card might do you well. There's a reason some are 5x the price of the cheap ones.
      - mindslight 6y ago
        A better SD card would be more expensive. But that doesn't mean if I buy a more expensive SD card it will be better. I've already been using name brand consumer ones like Samsung EVO+. And I don't have the patience to dig through spec sheets on Digikey to see which ones purport to handle power loss gracefully and then do web research to find out if they actually live up to that claim. My next use of RPis (security cameras) will just use SD to load the kernel/initrd, and then run from nfsroot. BTW this hasn't been a once a month problem, maybe once a year. But once a year is still too often for me, as I would assume it would be for anyone who relied on one to control their lights.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I've bought multiple access points, they all required rebooting. My HD TV requires rebooting once every couple weeks or so. Also my Roku box. Also the cable modem. My Grace Digital media server. Every damned thing I own that has a computer in it needs rebooting now and then. Including my Windows and Linux boxen. Or they just slowly grind down, likely from not doing a good job cleaning up unused resources.
- somehnguy 6y ago
  Stop buying consumer networking devices and the reboot problem goes away. Last I checked my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X uptime was just over 2 years. 0 issues. Same with the Unifi APs I use in my house.
  - bmurphy1976 6y ago
    I have to reboot at least one of our Ubiquiti switches each month on our office network. I'm very skeptical of Ubiquiti hardware. We had similar problems with their access points and swapped to them out for Cisco Merakis. I don't recall ever having to reboot our Meraki access points or firewall.

afandian 6y ago

Is this much different to DMX?

michaelt 6y ago
DMX is a one-way single-master bus. That means you can't have multiple light switches on the same network without quite a bit of complexity, you can't detect what's on the network, you can't update firmware or do device setup over the network, and so on. In stage applications that's not a problem because all the light switches are in one place - the lighting desk - and the lighting guy there can see all the lights at the same time.