The controlling PC or touchscreen has died
The computer or wall touchscreen that ran the system has failed. The important thing to establish immediately is how much of your system actually depended on it, because in most houses the answer is much less than people fear.
The controller has failed, and with it the interface and any logic that ran there. Basic switching continues because it lives in the C-Bus units themselves, out on the network.
The split that matters
C-Bus systems keep the core switching behaviour in the units on the network. A wall switch knows which group it commands, and an output module knows which channels belong to which group, and neither needs a computer present to do its job. That is why your lights kept working when the PC died.
Layered on top of that, some houses had a PC or a touchscreen providing a nicer interface and extra automation: schedules, conditional logic, holiday modes, integration with other systems. That layer lived on the machine, and it stopped when the machine stopped.
- Still working
- Wall switches, the groups they control, the output modules, and any scenes programmed into the units themselves. The bones of the system.
- Probably stopped
- Schedules and timers, if they ran on the controller rather than in a dedicated unit. Any conditional logic. Remote or app access if you had it.
- Definitely gone
- The touchscreen interface itself, and any custom pages built for it.
- Not lost, just unreachable
- Your programming. It is still sitting in the units on the network. What you have lost is the tool for reading and changing it.
Nothing on this page asks you to take anything apart. Every check here is done by looking, or by pressing buttons that are already on the outside of a wall plate. Opening the hinged door of your switchboard to see the breakers is normal and fine. Removing the panel behind them is not, and neither is unscrewing a wall plate or lifting the cover off an enclosure.
In Australia it is illegal to work on fixed wiring without an electrical licence, and the reason is not paperwork: the terminals behind a C-Bus wall plate can be sitting at mains voltage. Anything past the faceplate is a job for a licensed electrician, ideally one with C-Bus accreditation.
Do not throw the machine away
This is the single most valuable piece of advice on this page. A dead computer almost always has an intact hard drive, and your project file is on that drive. Pulling a file off a drive that will not boot is routine and cheap. Rebuilding programming from scratch because the file was thrown out with the tower is neither.
The same applies to a failed touchscreen: it may hold the logic that was written for it, and it is worth someone looking before it goes in a skip. Keep the hardware until an integrator has told you there is nothing on it worth having.
What restoring access involves
Two things, and they are both obtainable. Software: C-Bus Toolkit, which Clipsal makes available at no cost, plus PICED if you had a touchscreen with custom logic. And a way to connect: a C-Bus PC interface, which is a small piece of hardware that bridges a computer to the network. If your dead PC was permanently wired to the system, that interface is probably already installed and still perfectly good, in which case a laptop is all that is missing. Those two pieces are explained in what C-Bus Toolkit is and what a PC interface actually does.
Do you need to replace the controller at all?
Worth asking honestly before spending. If the touchscreen was mostly a fancy way to do what the wall switches already do, many owners decide not to replace it and are perfectly happy. If it ran schedules you actually want, those can often be moved into the network itself so they no longer depend on any computer being alive, which is a sturdier arrangement than the one you had. If you want a modern interface, that is a genuine upgrade conversation rather than a repair, and it should be quoted as one.
Nobody can get into your system?
This is the situation we deal with most. Tell us what the dead machine was and whether you still have it. We can usually restore access without the original files, and we will tell you honestly whether the controller is worth replacing.