House Off - Combining advanced lighting scenes

[BAS]

I am a beginner and trying to understand how to combine some advanced lighting scenes in addition to my yale lock and audio. I have created two lighting scenes. One for the 1st floor and one for the second floor. I also have a yale lock for the exterior door and sonos audio in some rooms. I would like to program a keypad button at the exit door to do "House Off" which would activate both of my lighting scenes, lock the door and turn off any audio. I would then like to program the kepad LED to be blue when "House Off" is active and black when "House Off" is inactive. I have been able to program the individual scenes to keypad buttons and program the led. I am confused about how to combine all of this to perform the "House Off" function with LED programming. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks 

[South Africa C4 user]

You could do the following on keypad button press:

1. Activate Floor 1 off,

2. Activate Floor 2 off,

3. turn off all audio zones (best to do this in a macro and call the macro here),

4. Lock the door.

Personally, I would create a new lighting scene with all lights in this and replace steps 1 and 2 with this new scene (preferably have a dealer do this via connections) and use this to control the LED colour.

[BAS]

Thanks for the quick reply. I now realize that I probably should have posted this in the programming help section.  However,  what you are proposing is close to what I had been thinking, but then my question is regarding the LED color. Would the LED color be solely controlled by its association with the new lighting scene being either active or inactive (ex. House lights off)? 

That's where I started to get really confused, because if I have: 

1. Activate House Lights Off scene,

2. Turn off all audio zones,

3. Lock the door.

and the LED is linked to only the House Off Lighting scene then if any of the other 2 conditions become false at some point the LED would display blue rather than black? Is there a way to tie the LED color to all three criteria or is that over complicating the issue?

Thanks again for your help.

[Aayush Arya]

This is a fairly advanced bit of programming. There are quite a few things you need to do to implement it properly.

 

1. I would suggest that for such a destructive function (i.e. one that has the potential to be very disruptive if triggered accidentally or unknowingly), you program it to be activated on a triple click of your House Off button.

 

2. If you want the button to do nothing on a single click, ensure that it's not connected to anything in the Connections tab (which you may have done previously).

 

3. Set the LED behaviour to Push/Release and set an ON LED colour (I prefer white). This will have the effect of turning on the LED whenever you press the button and turning it off when released. I find this visual feedback very important to communicate that you've successfully pressed the button. You can set it to Programmed if you don't want that behaviour.

 

4. Make a Boolean variable "HOUSE_OFF". As a general best practice, make sure you write something along the lines of "This variable records whether the house is currently in the off or on state." This becomes very important when your programming becomes complicated and you start to forget which variable does what.

 

5. In the triple click event programming for the button, set it to activate both your lighting scenes, lock the door and turn off audio throughout the house (by turning off each zone individually).

 

6. What you now need to do is to ensure that your "HOUSE_OFF" variable is only true when all the aforementioned conditions are met, so you need to create a macro that checks whether all four of those conditions are met, and sets the variable value accordingly. Create a macro called "House Off Check" and drag in all the relevant conditions, joined by the 'AND' expression. It will be something along the lines of "IF 'scene 1 is active' AND 'scene 2 is active' AND 'lock is locked' AND 'zone 1 is inactive' (where the zones will all have up be checked for individually)", set "HOUSE_OFF" to true, ELSE set it to false.

 

7. Now you need to call this macro every time either of your two lighting scenes is activated or deactivated, when the lock is locked or unlocked, and whenever any zone in the house is activated and deactivated. This will ensure that the variable in question is always up to date.

 

8. That done, you can now add a program to the "HOUSE_OFF" variable's state changed event, like "IF HOUSE_OFF is true, set House Off button's indicator LED to red, ELSE turn it off".

 

9. To round things off, you should call this macro from your House Off button's Released event as well, so that whenever that button is released after being pressed, it will reset the indicator LED to its correct state.

 

That should take care of it. Let me know if you run into any issues.

 

Sent from my SM-G970F using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[BAS]

Wow. Thank you. That does seem advanced. I will probably keep it simple for now until I've gained more experience. Not sure I could pull that off but that is terrific information. Thanks for sharing.

[South Africa C4 user]

On 1/13/2020 at 6:59 PM, Aayush Arya said:

This is a fairly advanced bit of programming. There are quite a few things you need to do to implement it properly.

 

1. I would suggest that for such a destructive function (i.e. one that has the potential to be very disruptive if triggered accidentally or unknowingly), you program it to be activated on a triple click of your House Off button.

 

2. If you want the button to do nothing on a single click, ensure that it's not connected to anything in the Connections tab (which you may have done previously).

 

3. Set the LED behaviour to Push/Release and set an ON LED colour (I prefer white). This will have the effect of turning on the LED whenever you press the button and turning it off when released. I find this visual feedback very important to communicate that you've successfully pressed the button. You can set it to Programmed if you don't want that behaviour.

 

4. Make a Boolean variable "HOUSE_OFF". As a general best practice, make sure you write something along the lines of "This variable records whether the house is currently in the off or on state." This becomes very important when your programming becomes complicated and you start to forget which variable does what.

 

5. In the triple click event programming for the button, set it to activate both your lighting scenes, lock the door and turn off audio throughout the house.

 

6. What you now need to do is to ensure that your "HOUSE_OFF" variable is only true when all the aforementioned conditions are met, so you need to create a macro that checks whether all four of those conditions are met, and sets the variable value accordingly. Create a macro called "House Off Check" and drag in all the relevant conditions, joined by the 'AND' expression. It will be something along the lines of "IF 'scene 1 is active' AND 'scene 2 is active' AND 'lock is locked' AND 'media scene is active' (where the media scene will be all the zones in your house turned off)", set "HOUSE_OFF" to true, ELSE set it to false.

 

(I haven't actually used media scenes yet and am only assuming that they function similarly to lighting scenes. I hope someone will correct me if I've described this part incorrectly. If I have, you can achieve the same outcome by checking the state of each zone in your house individually.)

 

7. Now you need to call this macro every time either of your two lighting scenes is activated or deactivated, when the lock is locked or unlocked, and whenever the whole house off media scene is activated and deactivated. This will ensure that the variable in question is always up to date.

 

8. That done, you can now add a program to the "HOUSE_OFF" variable's state changed event, like "IF HOUSE_OFF is true, set House Off button's indicator LED to red, ELSE turn it off".

 

9. To round things off, you should call this macro from your House Off button's Released event as well, so that whenever that button is released after being pressed, it will reset the indicator LED to its correct state.

 

That should take care of it. Let me know if you run into any issues.

 

Sent from my SM-G970F using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This a great summary... the only item I don’t think will work quite as outlined is media scenes... if you really want to do this, you probably need to check each zone (room) individually to see if it is on or off in your macro.

[LollerAgent]

As noted, the desire to have LED's makes this a bit more complicated than it should be.  I have a pretty simple "Goodbye" button that does the following:

Executes a macro named "Goodbye" which in turn has programming that:

* Executes the "House off" advanced lighting scene

* Turns off all rooms (audio/video)

* Starts a 3 minute timer to lock all doors and close garage doors

I then use programming to program a double tap to execute the "Goodbye" macro.  No need to use variables or anything else.. but, once you start adding LEDs for tracking state, it becomes more complicated.

[Aayush Arya]

Although I understand that programming may not be everyone's cup of tea, I feel like those indicator LEDs on Control4 keypads are their single most useful feature and they should be properly utilised.

 

This a great summary... the only item I don’t think will work quite as outlined is media scenes... if you really want to do this, you probably need to check each zone (room) individually to see if it is on or off in your macro.

Ahh… should not have mentioned it without trying it out. I'll update the post (for the sake of others who might refer to it in future).

 

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[Aayush Arya]

Wow. Thank you. That does seem advanced. I will probably keep it simple for now until I've gained more experience. Not sure I could pull that off but that is terrific information. Thanks for sharing.

You should eventually try to set it up though, because it will be invaluable in terms of understanding how things are programmed in Control4. It will open up a lot of flexibility for you.

Sent from my SM-G970F using Tapatalk

[BAS]

This is all great information. Learning a lot from the responses. I am going to give this a try. Thanks again

[BAS]

Thanks again for all of the help. I finally had some time to try this and am really pleased. I have really learned a lot from this experience and I've gotten this working very well with the exception of one thing. I wasn't able to incorporate item #3.

"3. Set the LED behaviour to Push/Release and set an ON LED colour (I prefer white). This will have the effect of turning on the LED whenever you press the button and turning it off when released. I find this visual feedback very important to communicate that you've successfully pressed the button. You can set it to Programmed if you don't want that behaviour."

I really like this concept as the visual feedback is great. However, If I have the LED behavior set to push/release I am unable to have the keypad button display blue when the "house off" condition is met. If I set the LED behavior to programmed it works great, but I lose the feedback from push/release. Am I doing something wrong or are you unable to program led color and have the push/release feedback.

Thanks in advance.

[brucecampbell]

I found I needed additional coding for the 'House_Off' function - to prevent it happening when it shouldn't.

I have triple click on a hallway dimmer to trigger 'Good Night' mode (turn off lights and AV).
I now have a variable 'party mode' which I can set true/false from a custom menu.
if 'party mode' is true, the macros for House Off or Good Night etc. will not run.

I found out the hard way when 60 people were standing around in the dark with no music just because a kid wanted to turn the hallway lights off