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AssigneeThe Whitaker Corporation
InventorsDarryl J. Bryans, Lance B. Jump
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An electrical power control system is adapted for controlling power and lighting in a building. Switch controls have either relays or triacs, controlled by microprocessors, to switch power on electrical branch circuits. An interface device 122 communicates with the switches 124,126, arranged in a multidrop configuration, with variable length data packets over serial branch circuits or data buses 142. In addition to being controlled by the interface device 122, the switch controls also have local switch actuators. The actuation of the local switch controls can be used by the interface device 122 as a control inputs to initiate other actions. Adaptive polling of switch controls is used to minimize system response time, and both transmit and receive signals are carried between the switch controls and the interface device 122 at different times on the same twisted pair wires. The interface device 122 can also communicate with a home automation system controller.
A system for switching electrical power to a plurality of loads on a plurality of hot AC lines, the system comprising:
A network for controlling electrical power comprising a bidirectional half duplex serial link between a master interface and a plurality of slave nodes on the serial link, the master interface being capable of communicating with first and second slave nodes, the first slave node comprising a first switch control slave node having a first on/off power switching element with two positions, the master interface communicating with the first switch control slave node with a first packet consisting of a single switch control header byte including the first slave node address and at least one bit characteristic of the two positions and a single checksum byte, the master interface communicating with the second slave node including a switching element continuously variable between and upper and a lower limit with a second multibyte packet including a header byte with
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.