Considering migrating from an ancient custom system

[Allen Cronce]

I’m looking into migrating from a 22 year old bespoke automation system to C4. I’ve been in software development for over 35 years and want to be involved with the design of the new system, in conjunction with an installer that I’ve already spoken with.

We have a ton of dry contact light switches. It will be painful to replace them all (they're mostly in landscape orientation), so I want to consider the viability of a PLC (or similar mass input device) for some portion of the inputs (maybe 80% of the 106 switches). We have around 32 relays for fans, non-dimmable lights, etc.

I’m thinking about a combination of 4 or 5 IO extenders to support all the relays and some of the dry contact inputs for the lights, plus a PLC for the remaining light inputs that we’re not going to upgrade to C4 native switches.

I have to admit that I don't know much about PLCs or the standards used to communicate with them. If anyone has suggestions for a PLC direction that works well with C4, I'd be very interested.

I think we can connect our existing DMX commercial dimmer packs to the C4 via a eDMX1 Pro that I already own, but have not deployed (I was messing around with it).

All of our alarm inputs go into our automation system. The installer has recommended installing a modern alarm system, moving the inputs from the old automation system to the alarm. The C4 system would talk to the alarm and use the motion sensors to drive the lights. We’d need the alarm system itself to not use the motion sensors as an alarm trigger most of the time. The window and door sensors would be used as triggers.

We use card key access (HID) readers and electric door strikes to enter the house. Basically our automation system works in conjunction with a server that maintains a list of valid cards. I assume that there's some sort of way to integrate card readers into C4, but haven't turned up very much with light searching.  Probably this is an area where our installer can help, but in the interests of informing myself I'd be interested in any suggestions for integrating card key access into C4.

We have several crappy amber monochrome low resolution touch panels. They're all wired with CAT5 (WiFi wasn't a thing back then), so I can drive drive shiny new panels with POE. That part seems easy.

Any thoughts regarding these overall directions?

If anyone is interested, I can provide more details.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[SamA2V2]

You can do the programming via Control4 DIY. Otherwise, you can go through a dealer to get this all programmed.


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[Allen Cronce]

Thanks for the reply.

I’ll probably work with the dealer for the initial migration and programming.

Ongoing though I’ll definitely want to program it myself.

[Cyknight]

At that many required relays, using 3rd party options is likely cheaper - drivercentral.io has several options for serial or IP controlled relay modules.

 

That said - aren't the existing buttons merely controlling relays down in a central location? I would strongly urge you to consider putting panelized lighting. Yes a bigger investment now, but it'll clean up the situation and DIN rail lighting is widely supported.

The current switch location should have wiring that'll support low voltage power for zigbee keypads where desired, and if need be you can keep them horizontal.

 

HID access will the most issue - there's not a lot currently for C4 int hat regard, and it may not be possible to integrate the existing system into it.

[SMHarman]

Has anyone integrated unifi access. It's sitting on the same machine as protect etc.

[Allen Cronce]

12 hours ago, Cyknight said:

At that many required relays, using 3rd party options is likely cheaper - drivercentral.io has several options for serial or IP controlled relay modules.

 

That said - aren't the existing buttons merely controlling relays down in a central location? I would strongly urge you to consider putting panelized lighting. Yes a bigger investment now, but it'll clean up the situation and DIN rail lighting is widely supported.

The current switch location should have wiring that'll support low voltage power for zigbee keypads where desired, and if need be you can keep them horizontal.

 

HID access will the most issue - there's not a lot currently for C4 int hat regard, and it may not be possible to integrate the existing system into it.

Our system is configured such that all the CAT-5 switch wires go into our head end room. These are treated as dry contact inputs to a couple of DCUs. 

When a switch is thrown the DCU will either translate the event to DMX (most of our lights are on a set of 20 commercial dimmer packs), or throw a relay (which are also centrally located in the head end room).

Sure I guess we could change our switches over to Zigbee if I can find a horizontal model that I like that works. In our case, we can fit up to 3 switches in a plate. I've uploaded an image of what we have now.

I tool a look at drivercentral.io and it looks like they have some interesting stuff. I particularly like their LightWave RF switches, although they might be full line voltage (which would not work for us).

If possible I'd like to keep most of our existing switches and wiring. That's why I asked about a PLC. Effectively a PLC would replace our DCUs.

I don't want to keep the current DCUs because they use custom hardware that is no longer being made because the company went out of business. Also, they only speak AppleTalk (yikes!), not TCP/IP. Getting them to work with a C4 would require driver programming, if it was possible at all.

Does anyone know of a PLC, or at least a PLC communication standard (like Modbus) that works with C4?

Too bad that HID access isn't directly supported. I guess nowadays people go more for smart locks. Anyway, I really want HID support so I'll have to figure something out.

[Allen Cronce]

11 hours ago, SMHarman said:

Has anyone integrated unifi access. It's sitting on the same machine as protect etc.

I'd really like to stick with HID if possible. We have HID at the office, so I'm able to use the same card key for home and office.

Kind of silly, but it is convenient.

[SMHarman]

I'd really like to stick with HID if possible. We have HID at the office, so I'm able to use the same card key for home and office.
Kind of silly, but it is convenient.

What do you need to do with the door.

A separate hid access that sends a signal to a contact sensor when the hid demagnetizes could create the necessary feedback.

[SMHarman]

When a switch is thrown the DCU will either translate the event to DMX (most of our lights are on a set of 20 commercial dimmer packs), or throw a relay (which are also centrally located in the head end room).

There are a couple of DMX drivers that could work from the controller to the lights.

One from engineering solutions and one from Enttec.
Engineering solution uses a serial connection and does most of the processing on their red box so can give smoother fades etc. That has a paid driver.

Enttec is a legacy extra vegetables driver so free from Control4. The processing is done on the Controller so fades are a little more choppy. I have this but the impact is sufficiently minimal that I am not changing it anytime soon.

[SMHarman]

http://www.chowmainsoft.com/sainsmart-imatic-v2

This is a more affordable relay solution.

[Allen Cronce]

10 hours ago, SMHarman said:

http://www.chowmainsoft.com/sainsmart-imatic-v2

This is a more affordable relay solution.

Thanks. I can see replacing my existing relays (which are centrally controlled via a DCU) with a set of these Ethernet enabled units could definitely work.

Regarding the HID, the way it works now is the card reader is connected to a DCU. When a card is presented, its ID value run past the server (which manages a list of valid cards). If the card number is valid, the strike is magnetized for a few seconds, allowing the door to be pushed open.

Hopefully there's something similar we can do with the C4 integration.

On the DMX side, I can definitely use an Enttec if my existing eDMX1 Pro doesn't work. No problem there.

I still have the problem of integrating a reasonably large percentage of dry contact light switches to a C4 system. That chowmainsoft.com link you provided led me to find ControlByWeb, which makes a web enabled modules that can be built up into a PLC (as far as I can tell). The ChowMainSoft folks have a driver for ControlByWeb systems.

It looks like a ControlByWeb X-400 or X-600M could be paired with a number of digital input expansion modules that could be polled by the C4 system via a ChowMainSoft driver. The ChowMainSoft site indicates that feedback is not instantaneous due to polling, but if it's fast enough to be under human perception (200 milliseconds or so) then it should work fine. I'll reach out to the ChowMainSoft folks separately and ask them about their solution.

In the meantime, does anyone have any experience with how well ControlByWeb integrates with C4 via ChowMainSoft's driver? I've done some searching and I can see ControlByWeb being recommended in a number of cases, but not as an input of lots of dry contact switches.

Of course if anyone has direct experience with other PLC input solutions that works well with C4, I'm all ears.

Thanks in advance!

[Allen Cronce]

Alan Chow answered my question. Looks like ControlByWeb won’t work because the polling would make switch response times too slow.

He recommended looking into KNX. That direction seems promising.