ON and OFF Brightness behaviour

[Kevin]

Cortex has an ability to set an on and off brightness for each dimmer (nice) which I've been playing with. Overnight I have a lamp that toggles between two levels 75% and 25%. It was in a night mode 'off' at 25%.

During the night the lamp turned itself completely off and the switch on/off control also didn't work either then or this morning, although Cortex was running. This I found was because I had Cortex 'auto update' set at 4AM and v24.02 was released. After the update and Cortex restart I notice that the on and off brightness were both now set at 0 so the light was actually controllable but both on and off were at zero brightness. I'm sure there's something I need to do to persist my on and off brightness levels but what is it ? I know Cortex saves the DB when updating itself.

This off brightness level is a useful feature although it's slightly weird to have an 'off' brightness rather than say two preset 'on' levels and an 'off'. So ..just a heads up that if you do use xAP to integrate other dimmer controls eg C-Bus , Dynalite, DMX etc that this behaviour is different on those systems (off is always off) . Because of the way xAP is integrated within Cortex it needs careful attention to get such external dimming working as expected. For C-Bus users I am about to release a new firmware version for the xAP/C-Bus gateway that improves this (it recognises Cortex as a specific type of xAP controller).

K

PS Vivian - if you want look over the nuances of this I have them documented. It's another one of those things that appears very simple but actually is annoyingly awkward to try and mimic the IDRANet modules, even in on / truly off mode.

[Karam]

..... This off brightness level is a useful feature although it's slightly weird to have an 'off' brightness rather than say two preset 'on' levels and an 'off' .....

Just incase others are wondering: there are ofcourse also different preset ON levels - these are called scenes - and 4 user configurable scenes are provided per light. But it is also possible to just directly set any numerical value. The reason for this plethora of control methods and the somewhat unconventional capability of having a non zero off value, is to enable Cortex to maintain its highly integrated automation philosophy in the face of a variety of behavioural desires that we have discovered along the way..

[Viv]

Cortex did not save the Dimmer on/off values. Becasue it was anticipated that the values would be set by the lights scene options or a Scene object to profile the dimmer values.

A Cortex update will be available to version 24.1.0 which will provide a default dimmer on and off value. This will be used on network start and override clear operations.

Viv