South Africa C4 user

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!

Yes! One is the ABR 4500 and the other is the ABR 5000

Thanks everyone! Some really useful feedback. @Shoe - I have Luxul routers at both residences. While they allow client VPN which I use regularly, they don’t allow site to site VPN AFAIK. I suspect my best option is to stick with my clunky solution in the short term and change routers in both houses thereafter.

I must say that as a (relatively) educated end user with 2 homes (both massive systems), I fully understand this viewpoint. My dealer has taken a couple of emergency calls at 9pm on a Friday evening. The reality is that in these sorts of emergencies, even my dealer has been able to do very little BUT due to the relationship, he has been able to calm me down and assure me that we would get it all sorted out. I suspect that the telephonic support I would get from someone with no clue about my system would just irritate me in that sort of situation… I should also say that my dealer has always been extremely gracious in these situations and his wife has (as far I can tell ) been very understanding when he has spent an hour on the phone to me… That said, my dealer does not currently charge me for these sorts of calls but makes his money on my regular additions and changes to the systems.

Brilliant! Enjoy

Thanks! I hadn’t thought of the Multisystem driver. I had a quick look at the documentation and one problem (for my setup) is that it requires a secure tunnel (VPN) between the residences. My routers are not capable of this… but it has sparked another thought. Maybe I should upgrade my routers as creating such a tunnel would open up various other ways of swapping data between the 2 residences. I will give it some thought although I think it will be a bit too expensive for now.

I have Control4 set up at my main residence and my beach house. I would like to update 15 or 20 register values (number variables) from one house to the other every 10 or 15 minutes. I currently do this for one or two values (registers) in 3 different ways but all of these are clunky and definitely not elegant. I also suspect that they are not very scalable. Does anyone have any recommendations on how best to do this?

I do this with a 2 second timer. Every button push adds 1 to a user variable (let’s call it ButtonPushed) On ButtonPushed changes, I have the following: If ButtomPushed = 1 start timer On timer expires, I have: look at value of ButtonPushed and decide what to do (I use 1, 2, 3 and 4 or more as my conditionals). set ButtonPushed to 0 My primary use of this code is to give more flexibility to the 3 custom buttons on SR260 remotes and to make the red button on all of my remotes into a panic button (if pressed multiple times).

Weird but this has miraculously sorted itself out! I wonder if a server was down…

I tend to agree, I can’t see OS4 being anytime soon…. Nor do I see a great need for OS4. But I have been wrong before ( often). I can see a lot of things that could be improved on in OS3 though so I am all for OS3.5 sooner rather than later!

A number of C4 employees do monitor the forum from time to time and sure they will appreciate your thoughts. @bnorman @Darin, PM C4 CX,UI @ChrisHenderson

I’m not a dealer so not an expert in anyway! But I thought you could add a controller to a project and then migrate Director to that controller? Clearly not?

@Cinegration

While I hear you… I am the kid in the candy store when it comes to C4 updates… has only bitten me twice BUT, the 2 bites have been the last 2 updates. I bricked my system at my Beach House with the OS3.4.0 update. Waiting a week wouldn’t have helped although waiting for 3.4.1 probably would have. All that said, C4 support across 4 continents were a great support and got me back up and running although I did have a heart attack (or two) for a 1 week period… The second bite is not having HE available on OS3.4.1. And while irritating, it is not the end of the world (will be in a week or so though )