The ARC-SWK is a popular wall panel for SymNet systems. Symetrix has been involved in many designs where the LEDs for the ARC-SWK (or ARC-SW4) need to respond in a unique fashion in relation to the buttons they are associated with. In standard modes, the LEDs follow the buttons and will light green or red when the button is pressed or it can toggle on and off when the button is repeatedly pressed.

But what if you want to make the LEDs toggle between green and red? Or what about amber LED indication which can be achieved if the LED red and green state are triggered simultaneously? To achieve this, you have to be aware of a few things…

In the Controller Manager, create an ARC-SWK in the RS-485 Network.

Double-click the ARC-SWK in the menu tree to edit its settings and select the “Switches Tab”.

Fig 1: Controller Manager Window (under the Tools pull-down menu)

Select “Independent Switches” mode in the Switches tab.

Fig 2: Independent Switches Mode

Select “Manually Assign LEDs” in the “Switch LEDs” mode. Now the LED Number pull-down will be activated and you can select each LED for editing. The “Controller Number” assignments for the Green and the Red LEDs can now be set.

Fig 3: Manually Assign LED mode

The Next phase uses the RS-232/485 Output modules. These are located in the Control Modules menu in the SymNet Toolkit (F8 toggles the toolkit on and off).

Fig 4: RS-232/485 Output Module located in: Control Modules> Control Outputs> RS-232/485 Output module

Now let’s look at a design concept where 2 presets are toggled on and off with one button on an ARC wall panel. Below is the module design.
View Image

There is a button that would be linked to the button on the ARC SWK.

There are 2 preset trigger modules and an inverter.

The inverter module allows one preset to be triggered when the button is pressed/on and another when the button is pressed/off.

The RS-232 modules are then used to relay controller number information to the RS-485. Notice they are set to numbers 1 and 2.

These are the same setting as in Fig 3 which shows how the ARC needs to be configured.

Remember the ARC entire site file needs to be downloaded before it will work. The ARC network has a separate download.