Working with Axcent 2

TurnipTruck

Greetings,

I have been tasked with cleaning up a system based on an Axcent 2.

Can you work with them in the manner as you do Axcent 3? Debugging, Emulate and Control a device, etc?

Any other potential pitfalls to be aware of?

Thanks.

kbeattyAMX

It's like an Axcent 3 except you cannot put the Axcent 2 into slave mode.

TurnipTruck

Thanks dude. Maybe I'll see you around here some day again.

richardherman

Although I only have limited experience with Axcent2, there are a few pittfalls. Before firmware version 4, OpenAxcess is NOT supported. Even things like strings as constants are NOT supported. The latter gave me some headache last time. It might be wise to check out PI (limited info)

You can only upgrade the firmware by buying EPROMS; two years ago they were still available, but it wil cost money.

Richard

kbeattyAMX

Oh Yea! Forgot about those Eproms. I remember having sleeves of memory eproms and firmware eproms. Not the easiest to replace. Wasn't there like even and odd memory eproms? That was a trip.

DHawthorne

If it were me, I wouldn't even take it on. I'd rather upgrade them to a used Axcent3 than deal with the 2, even if I had to buy it on eBay. At least the Axcent3 has an upgrade path; you can convert it to a NetLinx system down the road by slaving it and tossing an NI-700 on there. The Axcent2 is limited drastically in what you can do with it, and there is no upgrade path.

richardherman

DHawthorne wrote: »

If it were me, I wouldn't even take it on.

I tend to agree. Having learned 'AMX' on NetLinx, my first thoughts were these were just older brothers of NetLinx, limited of course, but nothing i couldn't handle. After i had done a couple of Axcent2's and even 3's i realised there were a LOT of (subtle) differences and the limitations were sometimes larger than i thought. This made programming these systems really frustrating, because you have to think completely different than i'm used to with NetLinx. And, as an added bonus, you 'inherit' the current program, probably written by someone else. And that can be a challenge all by itself.

Probably someone who 'grew up' with Axcent thinks different. Or maybe not, as Dave seems to be a AMX veteran...

Richard

TurnipTruck

As far as the programming job I asked about, I have the existing code and it's not too bad. I started programming with Axcess on Axcent 3s. So as long as the Axcent 2 behaves the same way as an Axcent 3, I'm not scared.

annuello

According to the Axcent2 Reference Guide, you can only pulse up to two IR ports simultaneously. That is, if you are sending an OFF code to three or more devices at the same time (like in a Shutdown call), you will have to delay some of the IR pulses until the previous ones have completed. Obviously a FIFO buffer (or dual FIFO buffer) would be the best way to handle this case.

Yours,
Roger McLean
Swinburne University

AV_Junky

annuello wrote: »

According to the Axcent2 Reference Guide, you can only pulse up to two IR ports simultaneously. That is, if you are sending an OFF code to three or more devices at the same time (like in a Shutdown call), you will have to delay some of the IR pulses until the previous ones have completed. Obviously a FIFO buffer (or dual FIFO buffer) would be the best way to handle this case.

Yours,
Roger McLean
Swinburne University

I created a dual fifo back in the late 80' just for the Axcent2, if anyone is interested I still have the code kicking around in my archives.