The beauty of the Faradite ORE range of keypads is striking, says the maker, but behind each solid brass front plate lies a technology that enhances that beauty and offers some powerful user feedback. The affectionately named ‘Halo light’ sits behind the brass plate and is in place to provide crisp, uniform LED lighting capable of many impressive features. The light can perform a range of functionality in partnership with Faradite’s KNX range of keypads.
Orientation light
When lights in the room are off, the outer edge of the keypad can be configured to be on at a set brightness at all times to provide a subtle orientation light to help find the switch in darkened spaces. This option can be configured to be on at all times or linked or linked to a 1-bit group address for control by a third-party device brightness sensor meaning it will only be illuminated when the LUX in the room drops below a set threshold.
Configuration options
The keypad can be configured in two ways; using the Faradite ‘Smart Scene Plate’ option, or by commissioning the keypad as five independent buttons. Smart scene plate quickly delivers an intuitive and easy lighting scene control configuration with feedback lights configured as part of this setup. When configuring as five independent buttons, the feedback options for each button are expansive and can be tailored to even the most demanding customization requirements.
Smart scene plate feedback LEDs
Upon interacting with the keypad to trigger the desired lighting scene, the feedback functionality can be configured to show the currently active scene by illuminating the active corner in blue, while the other three corners are a neutral white, for example. This feedback colour can be customised to the user’s requirements and provides an instant and clear indication of the active scene.
Notification LEDs
A Faradite favourite is the feedback notification LED options the keypad can perform. These temporary light statuses are intended to provide visual notifications of other actions around the KNX system. A typical example would be a feedback LED object linked to the building’s doorbell, so all keypads will flash blue for 30 seconds after a doorbell press. A second notification LED might be used to alert homeowners that the garage door has been open for more than half an hour by displaying a rotating LED in orange on just the downstairs keypads in the house. The KNX keypads can have up to three notification LED objects.
These three feedback options each have a priority level as they must all interact with each other on the same keypad. Orientation lights have the lowest priority level, feedback lights have a middle priority and notification LEDs have the highest priority level.
The LEDs provide users with various other visual feedback. Upon successful booting up of the keypad, the LEDs will flash red, green, and blue to verify powerup, also after downloading the KNX configuration the keypad will flash green three times to verify the download.
Due to the product architecture and how Faradite has designed the LEDs, the functionality is the same on both the Alpha range and the ORE range. These powerful feedback LED options are available on the KNX variety due to the two-way communication possible with KNX. The volt-free range of keypads also includes LED lights but with a reduced functionality range. Contact Faradite to find out more.
