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Vantare Remote Control
12-10-2016, 12:19
Post: #6
RE: Vantare Remote Control
Here's a post I made to Prevost Owners Group. For completeness I'm including it here on PreGu. BTW, Donnie Myers said Vantare went to the motorized CB's in the 1998-99ish time frame.

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Hey Donnie,

Great to hear from you and thanks for the reply. Hope everything is going well down in your neck of the woods.

I have to agree, the Phase Loss boards are a piece of work. Stuffed into those tiny boards is a power rectifier, three voltage regulators, a 555 timer, and ancillary circuitry including three RC time constants. All to basically send a hardwired input signal to the Powerlink AS Interface Module (PIM) to shed loads upon power loss, and to delay 60s before negating the PIM input signal thereby restoring shed loads on power restoration. Most folks today would throw a small microcontroller at it, but back in the day we did it with descrete components. The voltage regulators get hot. I'm equipping mine with heatsinks. There's three per board. Heat sinks improve the case to air thermal conductivity by a factor of 4 making things much cooler.

I'm glad to hear that Vantare went to the SquareD/Schneider Powerlink G3 system around 2006 rather than abandoning the motorized circuit breakers. As you can tell I'm a fan of these CB's. The advantages are numerous: small form factor, latching, no power consumption once switched, 200000 cycles, internal backup power in the form of a super-capacitor, ability to fully shutoff loads at the panelboard, and an interface that allows integration with modern day control systems. Speaking of which, when Schneider bought SquareD and obsoleted the Powerlink AS system (I believe you refer to it as the G2 system) they did a marvelous job of scrubbing the web of any documentation. I had a tough time figuring out how to program the thing. The PIM has an RS232 interface that Vantare's already using to interface with the upstairs EAO switches so I had to come in on the RS485 interface, but the 485 signal isn't interpreted by the PIM. To get my remote control system working I had to add the Powerlink AS42CMT control module. This is the multi-button LCD device that plugs into the PIM; I believe the G3 has a similar device but I think on the G3 it's integrated and required. Vantare didn't include the AS42CMT with the Powerlink AS equipped coaches, so I bought two on ebay. Ebay has plenty of them for sale ranging in price from the low hundreds to over $3,000. I picked up two at $100 a piece.

So now I can command the PIM indirectly via the AS42CMT. The next step was to send command signals to the AS42CMT. To do this I bought a SquareD EXG100 which talks modbus/TCP on one side and SqureD SY/MAX on the other. (I'm too lazy to code a SY/MAX implementation). From there it was simple to send Modbus commands to my PIM via the EGX100 gateway and the AS42CMT all the while the upstairs EAO pushbuttons are sending PIM commands over the RS232 link. Everything fits together beautifully. Switches thrown in the house show up on my remote handheld (Ipad or Android) and switches thrown on my handhelds show up on one another and on the upstairs EAO switches.

IOWs, if you added the AS42CMT and the EGX100 to the older coaches I'm pretty sure your RTI could control the whole thing. Schneider is still supplying the EGX100 but the AS42CMT is obsoleted; however, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of them on the surplus market.

david brady,
'02 Wanderlodge LXi 'Smokey' (Sold),
'04 Prevost H3 Vantare 'SpongeBob'

"there is no perfect forum there are only perfect forums"
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Messages In This Thread
Vantare Remote Control - davidbrady - 12-03-2016, 14:53
RE: Vantare Remote Control - davidbrady - 12-10-2016 12:19



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