R4s Custom Events don't work

I only have 2 R4's per gateway and no traffic unless there's an event and I have very little events that would send to the R4s and even then very little traffic. I also don't send anything to the R4 when they come online except for the ?TXT to query 1 button. On this job there are 4 gateways and 8 R4s and I tried to send the query via control device to to see if it would work when they're known to be awake and have been online and stable for awhile. I also set one up in my office 1 on 1 for additional testing and still no joy.

My channels, as posted in another thread are 15, 20, 25, 26 which don't overlap with any wi-fi channels and there's no other 2.4ghz stuff on the job, heck this job still doesn't have any telephones installed. The microwave wasn't in use either. My gateways are reasonably close to their associated R4s and they seem to update fine when they do update. I haven't check the gateway's logs but I really don't think there's a latency issue and definitely not on ever R4, every gateway and then in my office.

If anyone has had success with this with R4s I'd gladly keep trying but right now I just don't think it's supported in the firmware and the documentation is just wrong. Of course I'd rather be wrong since my code is all written to handle this and I modified my existing code so I only update certain things after a reboot but now this only works on 1/2 my UI's. The TPs work fine but the R4 don't. I feel like I got all dressed up and now I have no where to go.

ericmedley wrote: »

Dave might be on to something. Zigbee is tooooo slooooow for what I think we want and should be able to do with them. (I'd just be happy if I could upload a stinking tp file to them without having to drive 40 miles.)

When I first started doing R4s I tried all the bells and whistles at first. But, some little voice in my head kept saying, "Don't show any of this to the designers.. Don't show any of this to the designers..." I'm glad I listened to that particular voice in my head because I found that many of the 'cool kids on the block' features would work with the remote sitting on my desk next to the gateway but would hiccup and fail in real life..

Consequently, my R4s are very simple designs that flat aren't that flashy. But, they seem to work pretty reliably.

It may well be that the remote's real operation does not match the manual. This is probably a good tech support call IMHO

I agree and basically went through the same preocesses until realizing less is more when it comes to R4s however that's what I'm trying to accomplish. I just want to be able to determine if the R4 has been rebooted or a new file has been transferred to it so I can send even less updates than I otherwise would have to by not knowing.

I basically just want to ask it 1 question to determine if a reboot or file xfer has occurred since the last online event so I can ultimately send it less traffic when it comes online and eventually when it goes onto a particular device page. I'm really trying to do less not more.

The ?TXT command is really not different than ^TXT in that it receives the command to write text so it should recieve the query command to tell me what text is on a button but it just doesn't respond with anything which to means it probably doesn't understand the command because it's not supported in firmware.

edit: added
It probably would be a good thing to call into TS but I normally don't bother them plus I really don't think they'll give me a solution. Maybe they'll consider updating the firmware and make it possible in the next release but by then I'll have re-written the code and won't want to re-visit it. Besides even though I can call TS I'm still pissed at AMX about the whole BS program stuff.

Well I broke down and emailed TS and told them about the problem and the first response I received stated that only button queries were supported at this time. So I informed him that wasn't the case cuz all I wanted was a button query and they don't work. Today he came back and confirmed they indeed do not work and reported the bug so some day, hopefully in the next firmware release they'll be fixed.