Dimming Question

[James Sentman]

With the simple X10 dimmers you’re running into the “nova” problem. After a hard off they will go to 100% no matter what you tell them to do next. For those we have the “simulated” setting. What that does is override the hard off and instead dim the light to 0, then you can dim the light up from 0 and it will respond. So no actual off is sent to a “simulated” light. There is a bunch written about the nova effect on the shed.bz here http://www.shed.bz/tutor/justlites.html and elsewhere. The problem is that when someone hits them manually or when the power goes off they revert to all the way off and will nova again when you try to dim them up. There are ways to continually reset that, but nothing works perfectly.

For the smarter leviton switches you probably want to set them to be “smart” instead of simple or simulated. XTension will assume that the light remembers it’s last state and will just send the ON and the appropriate dimms necessary. And as Chuck says, use the xpress command in any script where you control them. If they are as good as the smart X10 switches which I’m sure they are, then they will work much better that way.

What you’re running into with the brighten command is an interesting artifact of how the software interacts with the not so smart dimmers. If you issue a brighten to 100 and XTension thinks the light is already at 100, then it really shouldn’t send anything at all, but just in case the light and the database are out of sync it sends another 5% brighten each time. The same thing happens in reverse if you dim to 0 a light that XTension thinks is already at 0. It sends another 5% dim just in case. What that means is that XTension thinks that light is already at 100% because it’s not setup as smart so it doesn’t remember the actual last ON level. A lot of the problems will go away when you switch to smart mode.




> On Nov 10, 2015, at 5:27 PM, Chuck <xtension4osx at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> Use “xpress”. This will take it to the exact setting you want.
> 
> xpress “living room track lights D11” to 60
> 
> I used to have a lot of Leviton dimmers and that command is really slick and works well.
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com