Larger C-Bus Installations

Around the world many conference centres, stadiums, hotels and other commercial premises rely on C-Bus to deliver a flexible and reliable intelligent load switching capability. These installations typically include a large number of control circuits, and for some, multiple standalone C-Bus networks interlinked by C-Bus Network Bridges.

SmartSERVER can form part of these solutions because it supports both multiple lighting applications (each up to specified limit of 255 devices) and multiple networks. Each C-Bus circuit within the SmartSERVER can have any valid lighting application and network allocated to it. What's more you won't find your networks swamped with unnecessary status requests. SmartSERVER looks at each lighting application it uses and optimises all network synchronisation requests accordingly.

Single Network Route

C-Bus bridges linking independent C-Bus networks can operate in two modes, one just relays traffic in both directions combining the traffic load at each site. This is the simplest configuration and allows all devices to talk to each other. The other mode only passes traffic specifically targeting a device on the other site of the bridge, or bridges.

The second mode is useful for achieving the largest network capacity because most data traffic remains localised to the origin network. Simple switch input units, for example, cannot communicate between these isolated networks as they do not support the specification of a route.

SmartSERVER Multiple Route Support

SmartSERVER provides for the definition of up to 5 individual network routes, which can each be up to 6 bridges deep (i.e. 7 serially linked networks).  These routes can be used in conjunction with all of the  lighting applications and/or any of the other applications supported by the SmartSERVER.

Other Configurations and Advanced Applications

You are not limited in the number of SmartSERVERs present on any of the networks either.  If needed, the number of virtual keypads can be increased beyond the capacity of any single SmartSERVER by adding additional units.

We have found that the SmartSERVER perfectly complements Clipsal's Pascal Automation Controller (PAC) for a complete C-Bus automation solution.

The common C-Bus Lighting/Control, Trigger (Scenes) and Enable (Schedule) applications are of course supported, so are others including Temperature, Measurement, Metering and more. See here for details.