South Africa C4 user

Something must be wrong with your (and your neighbours) setup. Control4 lighting is very reliable. I have used it in 3 houses over 15 years with almost no issues and I live in South Africa and have power outages every day. I flip between mains and solar daily and have the generator run at least once every 2 weeks. Still the lighting is perfect. I lost one keypad due to a lightning strike but that is it (from memory) in 15 years. Are you using centralised lighting or Zigbee? I wonder if you could have Zigbee conflicts if there are lots of different C4 systems in close proximity? Maybe try changing your Zigbee channel (if relevant).

I have 2 EA5s in my rack providing 4 analouge music feeds into 2 AMCs (amongst other items that are not relevant to this issue). The 2 AMCs play music across multiple zones. I am able to play 4 different streams of music (either MyMusic from a NAS or Tidal streamed via a family account) across 4 groupings of zones but I sometimes have an issue when all 4 streams are playing. If all 4 streams are playing and I have a stream that is currently only playing music to AMC1 zones and I add a zone from AMC2 (o vice versa), then things fall to pieces. If I rather add a zone from AMC1 to an AMC2 active zone (or AMC2 to an AMC2 active zone) then everything works fine. if I have less than 4 streams playing then I can add zones from either AMC. It appears to me that when I try to add add a zone from a different AMC, the controller temporarily needs a second stream for this and because I am out of streams (when playing all 4 available streams), it flips to the oldest stream (as it would do if I manually tried to add a fifth stream) which then messes everything up. However, I don’t see why an extra stream is needed from the controller in my scenario and I am 99% sure that this worked fine in previous OS releases (although I have probably not tried this for a year or more). Any ideas?

So I (actually my dealer) fixed this problem by re-flashing the one EA5. I was left with another audio problem which I will post on separately. I then swapped controllers as I assumed the re-flash had not fixed all audio problems. I was left with the same issue so am assuming that this is not a hardware problem (see separate post).

Beta is working great for me.

This is a good summary. In essence, if you work well with your dealer and you are both competent, you should end up with a great system… if not… you are in serious trouble.

You can access the if statements for day and month etc. by choosing the scheduler on the right side of composer. If you want specific holidays like Easter you can use one of the advanced / enhanced scheduler drivers. I use the Janus one and it is extremely powerful.

Thanks guys! Appreciate the suggestions. I got os.date and os.time working within the Yatun calculator driver so now have quite a bit of flexibility around this.

Is there a way (driver?) to get a date variable and a time variable in string format? I am sure there must be… I have created quite a cool log (via string variable with carriage returns between each log entry) which I am displaying on the Touchscreen via the Custom UI driver and can scroll through the last couple of days logs. It is more flexible for what I am trying to do than the history agent although it doesn’t display in quite as aesthetically a pleasing manner. The only thing that I am currently missing for my use case is a date and time stamp for each entry. If I could put the current date and time into a string then I would have that sorted… As I type this,I’m wondering if the Yatun calculator driver has this functionality… I suspect it does if I look up the Lua code for date / time.

I agree that C4 works well for these 2 groups of people. But it also works very well for other groups. I love C4 and don’t fit in either category…

I must say… there has been some phenomenal recommendations in this topic. I installed C4 in my main residence 11 years ago and have grown the system significantly since then snow control just about anything. I have never looked back. I then installed C4 in my beach house (controlling pretty much everything from day 1). What I must add is that (as many have said), having the right dealer is of paramount importance. I had numerous options of local dealers for my beach house and ultimately used the same dealer as I use for main residence (despite the 600 km - 1 hour flight - from the dealers offices which are near my main residence). Do C4 right and use a good dealer and you won’t regret going with C4

You could this driver to allow you to control how long the driveway is on for and another button (icon) to show if it is on or off. You could also have the other icon control on and off with on defaulting to, say. 3 days on and off turning it off… If you want to link control to weather, I would recommend including a weather station in your setup. I use a Tempest weather station but my problem is the opposite of yours - deciding when to cool things down (and how much)

I use this driver for numerous applications. Great driver.

@chopedogg88

Or if you want something really powerful, the following Domosapiens driver is worth looking at: https://drivercentral.io/platforms/control4-drivers/lighting/advanced-lighting-selector/

I don’t know Google but Alexa has reserved words that cannot (easily) be used with voice commands. “Movie” may be a reserved word.

The Temoest Weather Station driver gives you all of that. I am not sure if it can be used without having your own weather station though.

Even if you cannot pull up a keypad (which surprises me) can you not send keypad commands via programming with the NEO driver? That sounds like a big miss…. Every security driver I have used (admittedly only 4 or 5) has allowed me to pull up a keypad on the Touchscreen and send keypad commands via programming (which may take a few lines of code to do something but ultimately means that anything the security system can do can be programmed if you have the patience to do it.

There are various ways to view the data if you have it in Control4 (which requires a thermostat driver or Z2IO driver if applicable etc.). Viewing data can be done using (amongst others) the following drivers: bIcons (from bNet Solutions) - one of the more powerful drivers for showing data on an experience button, Custom Info Display (by Barbini) - a great way of showing a lot of information on one screen. BMS Monitor (by Janus) - the most powerful of these drivers and very useful if you want to track data (eg temperature and / or humidity) over time and visualise it via a graph(s) within Control4.

I agree. This is what I do and using a blank segment at the beginning of the announcement file, you can get a graceful opening to the announcement. I have failed to get a bulletproof graceful exit from the announcement due to volume differentials. I have tried 101 things to get this right and always failed, 8 wonder if a 5 or 10 second mute when an announcement ends would solve the problem. Certainly something I must try at some stage.

Thanks for the thoughts. I only have 2 connections (the 2 analogue ones) from each EA5. I do think that you are right and one of the EA5s is trying to keep open a phantom stream. I have narrowed the problem down to one of the EA5s and I am fortunate to have another EA5 that is acting as a glorified IO extender elsewhere in the house (long story but I swapped an EA5 in my other house for a Core 5 and that freed this one up so it ended up in this system but being under-utilised) so I have asked my dealer to come past and swap the EA5 that I think is causing the problem with the one elsewhere that has no media responsibilities. I am hoping that this will fix things and it will be an easy fix. The downside is that I then won’t have a “spare” EA5 in the system… Fortunately, neither of these units do Zigbee so I think it as simple as a physical swap and re-identifying the 2 units.

This is much better way of doing things than the C4 matrices (and I would assume many other) which simply mute and then return (no ramping) and often have audio overflow (playing at the announcement volume instead of the music volume) giving way too loud (or at least loud is the problem) music for a few seconds on certain zones after switching back…

I have had a very strange problem rear it’s ugly head in the last few days. I have 2 EA5s in my rack providing 4 analouge music feeds into 2 AMCs (amongst other items that are not relevant to this issue). The 2 AMCs play music across multiple zones. Up until now, I have been able to play 4 different streams of music (either MyMusic from a NAS or Tidal streamed via a family account) across 4 groupings of zones. Since sometime between Thursday and Monday, this has all changed and now I can stream the following: 1. Up to 2 streams of MyMusic. If I attempt a third MyMusic stream it plays for a few seconds (anything from 1 second to 30 seconds) and then turns the relevant room(s) off. Note: control4 has genuinely turned the music for this stream off, it is not simply muted. If I can get a fourth stream of MyMusic playing before the third stream dies then the fourth stream will continue after the third stream dies and i will essentially have 3 streams of MyMusic. 2. Up to 4 streams of Tidal (I think - I need to triple check this); 3. 3 streams of Tidal and 1 stream of MyMusic; 4. 2 streams of MyMusic and 1 stream of Tidal I cannot add a second stream of Tidal (if I do, it seems to think we are out of streams and hijacks the first stream with this stream leaving it active but with more zones and the latest music selection. I am finding the behaviour quite bizarre and struggling to isolate the problem. I am leaning towards the problem being one of my EA5s but it does seem bizarre. Any suggestions as to what the cause could be or methods of troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated. I’ve been in touch with my dealer and we have checked all sorts of things remotely but couldn’t find the root cause of the problem. We did manage to get to a stage where we diagnosed things as above. My initial diagnosis was simply that a third stream bombed out but I had not initially realised that Tidal and MyMusic were behaving slightly differently within my problem statement. I have (obviously) tried rebooting the entire rack. TIA

Volume can be controlled by Alexa at room level so you should be able to say something like increase bedroom volume by 5 or set bedroom volume to 20.

There is an option (on the right) to add 1 (or any other number) to a variable. I think it is called increment. I if you are still stuck let me know and I will try and get you a screenshot when the HE problem comes to an end.

Really? So Wireguard means I can create a site to site VPN? That is phenomenal! Thank you!