The present invention is, in one embodiment, a method for efficiently and reliably communicating button presses electronically ON a network from one or more push button nodes each having at least one push button and to a master node. This method includes steps of: generating status messages indicative of a push button states at each of push button node communicating the status messages to the master node via the network determining, at the master node and the state of the push buttons at each of the push button nodes from the communicated status messages and triggering a response of the master node and in accordance with the statuses of the push buttons determined from the communicated status messages.
