KPL questions

[markens]

I'm another longtime X10 user, transitioning to insteon. Just received my shiny new ISY99i yesterday, and by last night it was installed and working for all my basic tasks. Today I retired the trusty CP290, which has served me well for 15 years.

 

I'm very impressed with the capabilities of the ISY99, and the quality and responsiveness of the wiki and forums. I quickly found answers to just about every question I've had so far. And I found some great ideas for functionality I'll be trying out.

 

Now for the unanswered questions:

 

(1) I have a KPL-8 which I had manually linked as follows: buttons D,E,F linked to SLs, working two-way as conventional controls. Then button B as a scene button, linked (with different on levels) to the three SLs, and also linked to the D,E,F buttons on the KPL so they would go on/off with the scene. It all worked perfectly reliably.

 

Spidering my network worked fine, although this scene got set up without properly syncing the leds in the KPL. Reading up on this in the UDI forums gave me the reason why: problems linking multiple buttons on the same KPL in the same scene. OK, no problem. I replaced it with a triggered event and ISY scene, and it works fine now with the ISY.

 

But I got to thinking: I briefly tried a new Houselinc2 in this same situation, and it handled it fine. Houselinc2 detects and displays a "follow" condition among these buttons internal to the KPL (D,E,F are set to follow B, which exactly matches the controller/responder conditions I had manually programmed).

 

So the question: Is this a new feature of the KPL? Obviously Houselinc2 knows about it and can adjust it externally. Will ISY be able to as well? Just curious about what's going on.

 

(2) I have the backlight turned off on one of my KPLs. When accessing the LED brightness function via ISY, it reads a value of 3. But if I try to update it via that screen, it will not accept any value less than 17. Any value less than that gets bumped up to 17 when I save it, and the KPL backlight comes back on. Is there any way to turn it off via the ISY? I went back and manually reset it on the KPL, and the ISY again reads the value of 3. I left it alone at this point.

 

Thanks!

[Michel Kohanim]

Hello Markens,

 

The main issue is that spider does NOT bring in properties stored in local KPL memory. As such, you will have to recreate those (Drag and drop multiple buttons from the same KPL into the scene). Furthermore, the postings to the effect that you cannot have multiple buttons from the same KPL in the same scene applied to our releases 2.6.0 and below. All firmware after 2.6.0 allow you to drag and drop multiple buttons from the same KPL into the same scene with the following caveat:

- for KPLs 1.4 and below, the sub buttons of the same KPL can NOT control the load button of the same KPL

 

With kind regards,

Michel