South Africa C4 user

Are there any other changes to the OS / bug fixes or is the update simply to accommodate HE? I assume that it is not just for HE as the Beta for HE worked without an OS update…

49 minutes ago, BY96 said:

The beta works fine. Someone here can probably get you a copy. 

49 minutes ago, BY96 said:

The beta works fine. Someone here can probably get you a copy. 

@Darin, PM C4 CX Platform

I haven’t seen this yet but there is a refresh (or some such) program command (can also be run as a driver action within HE) on the Apple Bridge driver that often fixes issues like this.  I have added this command to my start up programming so rebooting my controller always does this which means I often miss these upgrade challenges…

In terms of displaying the voltage, the bIcons driver by bNet solutions has a neat display option for low voltage batteries.

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).

4 hours ago, oasisferine said:

I got the new composer HE Beta version 3.4.17013 and had same issue, reports error :-

"Could not authenticate connection to director 192.xxx.xxx.xxx common casue incorrect time / date on the contrliler or on othe computer running composer "

Did any one  else try and have a better result ?

Beta is working great for me.

43 minutes ago, bballjn64 said:

I'm not sure why people get so upset at opinions and experiences posted in this thread. The original post was "what are realistic expectations for Control4?" This is a completely open ended question that's depending on a wide variety of variables can be very different from user to user. If you're one of the apparently satisfied customers of some of the dealers who comment, then expectations are high. If you're someone else who's had poor experiences, or wants more out of a "smart home" than the ability to turn a lamp on and off to impress a dinner party, then you're expectations might be higher. Personally a home automation system should simplify you're interface with your home and the things you do everyday. If you're dealer has the ability to read your mind or better predict than you the the things you might find annoying after a few weeks or months of using the system, great! For everyone else, just like with any other smart home platform, it takes time to sort out how you actually use it, and also that the more connected devices you add, the more control and automations you can implement. This forum is filled with both dealers, and end users, who have wildly different experiences based on their side of the customer/dealer equation. Not sure why people feel the need to dismiss, or prove wrong an opinion or experience. Let the OP read comments and make up their mind. 

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. 

2 hours ago, cnicholson said:

Awesome.  I will explore more.  I did have the same question as @Shoe in terms of how to literally do this in composer.  Are you firing off scheduler events of like every 14th of month?  I'm still not seeing how to do this directly in Programming.  

Taking cues from @RAV, I have started to do this by using a HolidayState variable that I set to "Valentines" on 12:01am every Feb 14 and then set to "None" at 11:59pm every Feb 14, etc. and then in my Sunset event, I do a series of "If HolidayState=Valentines then [do Valentines stuff], then stop."  With default stuff at bottom

 

 

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.

3 hours ago, therockhr said:

Control4 only really works for 2 types of customers. I have posted this before but will again:

1 - the people with more money than time: they hired an integrator because they wanted to have some cool technology in their home and be able to control it all from 1 place. if control4 is being used in their home it probably wasnt their choice, it was the integrators. the technology in the background is irrelevant. its the integrator that matters. if the integrator thinks there is another product than could do what they want better or easier then they would have it. the customer doesnt care if the solution is open or closed (C4). they just want it to work.

2 - people with some money and some time -  this is the group who if there was a DIY (open) solution out there that could do all they want they would probably use it instead of C4. The fact is though if you want to have a hard button remote that can control all of your audio and video together easily there is just not anything on the DIY side that comes close (and on the custom side there isnt anything with the user base and price point of C4). And even if there was a product, the price of a CORE LITE and SR-260 is not that much different than what Logitech's last solution was going for. Yes there is the cost of an integrator but there are varying levels of what involvement you need from them if you have the time and knowledge. C4 has a great product at a great price for these types of users.

If you don't fit into 1 of these 2 categories you will likely not enjoy your experience with C4. If you do fit then there is a good chance you will really like it.

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

31 minutes ago, Rob21 said:

Thank you guys.

Is it possible to change these icons to something that resembles a heated driveway icon? Does anyone have thoughts on programming the driveway to turn on based on weather?

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)

9 hours ago, chopedogg88 said:

I just went through this for a client...ended up using this driver, even though the Icons for the driver aren't as nice/driveway specific.

https://drivercentral.io/platforms/control4-drivers/enhanced-countdown-timer/

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.

20 hours ago, WhyPhy said:

In my experience, with 20 zones across 3 AudioControl matrix amps, it’s better to just let C4 handle the announcement and not do custom programming. C4 does numerous pause/save/adjust/announce/resume steps that are not apparent and don’t necessarily behave consistently. The announcements Agent is basically a “black box” that’s supposed to just work.

 

Additionally, I have to add delays before each announcement so the first few seconds aren’t cut-off (the more zones, the longer the required delay.) In the end, announcements mostly works, but would be much better if implemented by the matrix itself as an “announcement input” vs C4 doing save/announce/restore for each zone individually. 

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.

5 hours ago, videostorm said:

This is correct.  The announcement feature ramps down the currently selected audio (to zero), then switches to the network audio to play the announcement (wav file), then switches back to original audio and ramps it back to original volume.

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…