Evok DALI support APIs

roberts_lando

Is there any support for Dali in Evok? I can't find anything about Dali in Evok docs. If not, will it be supported in future?

Thanks

tomas_hora

@roberts_lando Right now Evok supports only broadcast message to one of the DALI compatible channels to set the intensity of the lights (on/off/50%...). We do definitely want to implement more functionality (like addressing, scenes,...) in the future, but a little push from our customers is needed :)

roberts_lando

Hi Tomas, we are really interested of this support as we have developed a Dali interface in Node red to control lamps and create scenarios. Do you know how far is this support? About days, months or years? I would be glad to help if needed, we have bought one of your Dali S-605 to make some tests for now :) Where do I find the documentation to send those broadcast messages to the dali channel for example?

Martin Kudláček

Hi @roberts_lando,
the support of DALI in the EVOK is as described by @tomas_hora and right now we don't have any specific time schedule on extending the support. Due to the fact, that we use most of our manpower on finalisation of UniPi Axon's these days, it is highly possible, that we won't be able to work on it this year. BUT!:-)

We do have a complete HW support + low level API for sending and receiving DALI packets. It is still bit unofficial, but you can:

Send and receive DALI packets interfacing our ModbusTCP server
Use python-dali library together with our UniPi DALI connector

For next week, we are planning to unveil our very own Knowledge Base, where this will be thoroughly documented.

If you implemented a solution in Node-RED, you probably have some sort of interface with connector to the DALI backend - to be able to switch backends without disrupting the frontend functionality. I can imagine you can write a backend to our ModbusTCP registers map or to python-dali library. How does that sound to you?

Regards,
Martin

roberts_lando

@martin-kudláček sorry for the late reply.

My node-Red interface is only used to send/receive the intensity to a specific address or group and create scenarios.

Once you have documented your documentation about dali I could check the files and try to make some changes and pull requests to the projects if needed.

Thanks

Martijn Hemeryck

@martin-kudláček just looking into the DALI support. The way I understand the python-dali library to work, I need some kind of implementation of your unipi DALI connector to actually use it. The link in your post is not public though. Is this software somewhere publicly available? If not, DALI is not really an option for me to consider, actually.

EDIT: some background. After I previously had a project to interface with the neuron I/O via some polling procedure via MQTT, my next idea would actually be to likewise have an MQTT client running on the DALI controller you have (I believe the axon S605), interfacing via python-dali and your python DALI controller implementation.

Martin Kudláček

Hi @martijn-hemeryck,
We changed the repository's name to unipi-python-lighting and it resides here: https://git.unipi.technology/UniPi/unipi-python-lighting