Debugging UPB Signals

I've been noise hunting for X10 for so long that it's second nature, but now that we're adding new protocols totally different things are going to interfere with them. UPB may be how ever many thousand percent better than X10 and Insteon for reliability, but I just found a way to totally block every UPB signal in the house with noise. And noise that is interesting enough that it passed a lot of the checksums and the interface thought were valid signals, albeit with totally bogus command codes. The unit and network id's were consistent enough that for a while I thought I was receiving valid signals from some other device or from a neighbor or something! My poor interface was sending me packets as fast as it could and I couldn't transmit anything, even to a lamp module plugged into the back of the interface.

What it turns out to be that cause it (after going down the circuit breakers one by one until it stopped) was a CF bulb in the living room. But one that wasn't even on at the time. As I was taking the pictures for my last entry last night I moved around a bunch of the lousy LEd bulbs from one lamp to another to get the comparison photos. I put one of the old candelabra CF bulbs from that lamp into one that previously had a dimmable LED in it. But I failed to reprogram XTension to tell it that was not a dimmable bulb anymore. Using simulate preset dim on a regular X10 appliance module what this is means is that when the light turned itself off last night instead of sending an OFF it dimmed the light to 0. This CF bulb REALLY didn't like that. There is a tiny current flow at dimmed to 0 as opposed to fully off and this was causing the ballast in that bulb to have fits. X10 continued to work fine throughout the house, but UPB was stopped dead.

Sending the lamp a regular OFF stopped the problem. Turning it all the way on and all the way off seems to work fine, but if I dim the lamp to 0 the noise begins again. So we have our first data point in debugging for UPB.