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Control4 + HomeAssistant


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Who is using Home Assistant in conjunction with Control4? I’d love to learn more about what you’re doing and why. I’m intrigued by Home Assistant for its presence detection capabilities. I don’t know much about them just yet, but it seems as though there’s pretty great functionality there. 
 

As I try to decide how much time I should spend noodling with this (I do have Home Assistant spun up with a couple of basic non-Control4 integrations I made to help me learn), understanding how you all are using these items in conjunction with each other would be helpful!

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Unfortunately the Control4 integration for Home Assistant uses an unofficial API which can be broken at any time and only supports lighting control. Understanding this, I still find it useful for location tracking for turning on/off lights when arriving/leaving home. I have it set to turn different things on/off depending upon who is home/arriving/leaving and time of day. Location tracking is not always immediate, but I rarely need to manually turn lights on when I get home or turn them off when I leave. I prefer to use Home Assistant for this over other services because supposedly they don't sell any collected data to third parties, and it's convenient to have tracking from a service I already use.

I also pay for cloud access with Home Assistant ($5/mo) which gives me remote access to control my system (and C4 lighting by proxy). Everything else that I might need remote control access to is also integrated to Home Assistant, making it my primary control interface.

As someone who mainly uses Linux, I also appreciate that I can control and program Home Assistant from my web browser and don't need a separate or virtual machine to make changes to my setup.

I don't recommend using Home Assistant with Control4 if you're looking for guaranteed stability, and obviously YMMV on experience. I'd love to see an official integration from Control4 with more capabilities, but I don't see that happening.

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Would recommend using the IFTTT driver from @alanchow for location tracking/geofence w/C4 via Pushover; it's solid and isn't using anything like an unofficial API.  I've been using it for over 18 months now w/o any issues. Works really well for my wife and I when entering/leaving the home. I had to create some variables to track events, but I now have 4 macros based upon it: 

  1. First person arrives home
  2. Anybody arrives home
  3. Anybody leaves home
  4. Last person leaves home

Additionally, I've been able to have other scheduled events to only fire if someone is home or nobody is home. 

Do I feel geofencing should be part of the official C4 app with 4sight? Yes--but this is what we've got.

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  • 9 months later...
On 1/17/2022 at 2:19 PM, tmj4 said:

Would recommend using the IFTTT driver from @alanchow for location tracking/geofence w/C4 via Pushover; it's solid and isn't using anything like an unofficial API.  I've been using it for over 18 months now w/o any issues. Works really well for my wife and I when entering/leaving the home. I had to create some variables to track events, but I now have 4 macros based upon it: 

  1. First person arrives home
  2. Anybody arrives home
  3. Anybody leaves home
  4. Last person leaves home

Additionally, I've been able to have other scheduled events to only fire if someone is home or nobody is home. 

Do I feel geofencing should be part of the official C4 app with 4sight? Yes--but this is what we've got.

Might be a dumb question here but... how did you setup these rules with first in/last out rules? I'm sure that I'm missing something simple here but with IFTTT I just see when "my device" enters/exits the area.

Thank you!

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On 1/17/2022 at 2:19 PM, tmj4 said:

Would recommend using the IFTTT driver from @alanchow for location tracking/geofence w/C4 via Pushover; it's solid and isn't using anything like an unofficial API.  I've been using it for over 18 months now w/o any issues. Works really well for my wife and I when entering/leaving the home. I had to create some variables to track events, but I now have 4 macros based upon it: 

  1. First person arrives homeen
  2. Anybody arrives home
  3. Anybody leaves home
  4. Last person leaves home

Additionally, I've been able to have other scheduled events to only fire if someone is home or nobody is home. 

Do I feel geofencing should be part of the official C4 app with 4sight? Yes--but this is what we've got.

I do something similiar with Lutron Hub. I like your variable approach. Certainly a better way then I currently use!

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On 11/13/2022 at 4:15 PM, tilas711 said:

Might be a dumb question here but... how did you setup these rules with first in/last out rules? I'm sure that I'm missing something simple here but with IFTTT I just see when "my device" enters/exits the area.

Thank you!

To do this with IFTTT, I have it set up so that each person you want to "track" in your household has a separate IFTTT account and then you would need a separate iteration of the driver in your C4 project (can add as many as you want with your license). Then you would set up variables for each user and use those to allow C4 to determine if everyone is gone/at home or only a selected person. Once you have that done, you can basically program anything you want off the variables.  

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3 hours ago, rea said:

To do this with IFTTT, I have it set up so that each person you want to "track" in your household has a separate IFTTT account and then you would need a separate iteration of the driver in your C4 project (can add as many as you want with your license). Then you would set up variables for each user and use those to allow C4 to determine if everyone is gone/at home or only a selected person. Once you have done, you can basically program anything you want off the variables.  

This is how I do it also.  That said, HomeKit looks like an easier more efficient setup but using IFTTT like this works perfectly…

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I use Home Assistant and Control4.  I use the Generic TCP Plugin for Control4 and use it to make Webhook requests to Home Assistant.  I have about 20 ZigBee shades that don't work with C4 so I have them on Home Assistant, and then I use Experience Buttons and webhooks to open and close the shades.  I also use Home Assistant for Philips Hue as it supports Dynamic scenes which Control4 does not (the ones where you can press Play and they animate).  I also use webooks to trigger those scenes, such as "When XYZ Advanced Lighting scene is invoked, run webhook to set the Hue lights to a dynamic scene" etc.

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On 11/16/2022 at 11:45 AM, rea said:

To do this with IFTTT, I have it set up so that each person you want to "track" in your household has a separate IFTTT account and then you would need a separate iteration of the driver in your C4 project (can add as many as you want with your license). Then you would set up variables for each user and use those to allow C4 to determine if everyone is gone/at home or only a selected person. Once you have that done, you can basically program anything you want off the variables.  

This is what I do at my place. Works well. Been using this for quite a while with very minimal issues. 

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I use Home Assistant with Control 4 to Integrate zwave and zigbee devices back to control4. For zwave i use Zwavejs2mqtt and for Zigbee zigbee2mqtt on Home Assistant side and Berto's (MQTT gateway, relay and contact), web 2-way and Generic TCP Plugin driver on control 4 side. From C4 side i push mqtt messages directly to zwavejs or zigbee2mqtt and for feedback i use HA automations to make http request to control4 on web 2-way driver and c4 variables for devices that are not relays and contacts, like dimmers, thermostats, temperature, lux and humidity sensors. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/24/2022 at 10:31 AM, eon said:

I use Home Assistant with Control 4 to Integrate zwave and zigbee devices back to control4. For zwave i use Zwavejs2mqtt and for Zigbee zigbee2mqtt on Home Assistant side and Berto's (MQTT gateway, relay and contact), web 2-way and Generic TCP Plugin driver on control 4 side. From C4 side i push mqtt messages directly to zwavejs or zigbee2mqtt and for feedback i use HA automations to make http request to control4 on web 2-way driver and c4 variables for devices that are not relays and contacts, like dimmers, thermostats, temperature, lux and humidity sensors. 

What is the driver for Generic TCP Plugin that you are using?

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  • 10 months later...

For fun I installed HA last night in a docker on my unRAID server and I was surprised how easy it was to setup a bunch of devices that it found on my LAN, including Rokus, Sonos, Hue devices, SolarEdge inverter, C4 lights, etc.  It would take a while to properly configure, and I don't know how well it would do stuff like whole home audio, but it is pretty impressive.  It runs pretty fast on my server, and no hurdles to jump through for a DIYer.

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I have it setup as a docker container as well and haven't had much time to play with it, but i do use it for a few simple tasks that seem to work better than C4. 
I have it use my Nest doorbell to trigger my front porch lights if it is after dark
I also find the timers for my lutron lighting to work a little more effectively using HA rather than C4
I am trying to see how much i can shift my C4 stuff to HA but just haven't had enough time to dedicate to it yet

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