180223-2052 EST
I have never worked with one of these systems and thus I do not know much about the system.
hbiss has provided a link to a Lutron manual. This I have quickly looked at and I really was not able get an understanding of the system.
Some things I picked up or guessed at were:
1. Dimming ballasts all connect in parallel on a data bus used to send data to the ballasts. Maximum number of controlled devices on one data bus is 64. I believe this means 64 dimmers, and that none of these addresses are used for control switches or IR sensors, or motion sensors, or whatever. There might be some addressable on-off outlets, but I found no mention of such.
Every ballast has a serial number. In other words a second and larger address. This is used to select and program a new ballast.
2. Ballasts are designed only for fluorescent bulbs with filaments that must be constantly externally heated. This is the only way to have a dimmable fluorescent, unless some other means is used to excite the internal gas. I saw no mention of an LED ballast. An LED does not require heaters. However, it is possible that a fluorescent ballast might be used on some LED bulbs
3. IR receivers connect to the system to allow a programmer to communicate into the system, or for remote control devices to control the lights. From the IR receivers this communication is over the data bus and will use one of the 64 addresses, and/or serial number to communicate to a particular dimmer.
4. I don't know how much information is contained in the ballast itself as to how it works vs possibly some master computer storage location.
DrSnowman:
If possible, I would set up the necessary components on a bench to create a one light system and play with the programmer to see whether you can communicate to the troublesome ballasts. You would also want to see how things work with a known working ballast.
You can use a scope to monitor the data on the control channel. Quite likely an asynchronous communication code is used. Async means the data is sent serially, has a start bit, data bits, possibly parity, and a stop bit. This you could describe as an RS232 signal operating at some defined baud rate. More likely RS422 signal levels are used. Some digital scopes will have decoding for this. Otherwise use a digital scope and manually decode the signal.
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