OK, so I have had my CA10 installed for a couple of days now and am loving it. Whether it has fixed my original underlying problems, I am not yet sure as they were intermittent and I have a couple of drivers that my dealer still needs to get up and running on the CA10 (as the keys need to be linked to the new controller). I should know whether my problem has been solved in a week or so.
In terms of performance, my observations so far are:
1. Everything definitely feels much snappier. Including motion sensors, backlight changes on keypads, Navigation on a T3, Light responses, LED feedback on light switches etc. (note I have made no Zigbee changes as yet although I may move some Zigbee functionality from an HC800 to an EA5 as I now have an EA5 that does absolutely nothing except act as an OSD for my main theatre and run the third and fourth digital audio path)...
2. Navigator refresh takes around 30 seconds as opposed to 5 minutes previously.
3. I can now open my iOS App during Navigator refresh (it used to fail to connect while all my T3s were refreshing). The navigator refresh on the iOS app is now seconds - used to also be close to 30 seconds.
4. Director reboot / project loading is taking under a minute (compared to 5 minutes previously).
5. Project back up is taking a few minutes compared to 10 or 15 minutes (and often timing out) previously. Note: I have not actually timed these so the more accurate comment, is that this has changed from a heck of a long time to a reasonably acceptable time. My project is large, and I back up artwork and screensaver photos also.
6. Native Alexa control seems much faster which surprised me as I have always blamed the speed on internet connectivity between South Africa and the states...
There was a lot of random stuff happening in my project in the last month. I genuinely think that at 650 / 700 devices / drivers I was at the edge of what an EA5 could handle. So far I have seen none of this on the CA10 but as mentioned above, I am withholding judgement on this item for a week or so.
So far the CA10 is getting a big thumbs ups from me for big projects... Only time will tell how good the redundancy is.
I had a very (as in 30 seconds or less) brief look at the programming one can do against the CA10 and I see that one can program against a fault but I did not see a string variable that tells one what the most recent fault or log is... I may just have missed it. That would be a lot more useful than programming against various fault variables to determine what the status of the controller is for an e-mail notification.
As a complete aside, my system defaults to one of my HC800s for the first 2 digital audio paths and then to my EA5 and then to one of the other controllers. Is there any way to change the order as I assume using the EA5 for digital audio would be the better option than the HC800?
Mr. Daniel reacted to South Africa C4 user in Discussion of new CA-10 controller
