HomeAutomationNerd

In traditional terms, a controller is the Control Plane. For that you want reliability, resilience in the face of network failures, and features like battery backup. The Data Plane is where you need bandwidth. This is where AV moves around your network. You can envision a house - even how - with 20+ 4K video streams (cameras, etc). That data flows through you main network, not a controller. HDMI (and whatever is next) is a similar high bandwidth data plane. There is a bit of crossover (a controller does some music, a bit of video transcoding while an HDMI. Link might carry some control-plane data. Generally though, given current architectural designs for software and hardware, a 10gb link wouldn’t be on my priority list. Now eARC and other tech is high in my list... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Your dealer sound like it might be worth looking around more. I own HDMI Fiber cables (from Monoprice), and they're great. They enable 4k, HDR, 60fps, over long runs (50'+). I've never heard anything about needing them to stay within a warranty. For a 15' run that seems like.. .well, smoke.

Your first step is to make a choice: Do you want a local dealer or a remote dealer? There are a ton of awesome folks here who can help you remotely, but then you'll be on the hook for all the physical stuff. Once you pick a dealer, they can help with pretty much everything you mentioned. I will add the Denon / Marantz combo works beautifully with C4.

I've gone with Vogel mounts of my stuff. It's not cheap, but I will say the mounts are quite nice. From the unboxing - the stuff is crisply and professionally packaged, to screws that fit, sliders that work, and pieces actually looking nice, I've been happy. Even my wife approved, which is rare indeed... https://www.vogels.com/en-gb/c/lg-oled-tv-wall-mount

I'm looking for suggestions for outdoor floods + camera's. The camera's need to be: Waterproof / Weatherproof Wifi Cameras (no ethernet here, but I do have power) 1080p + Motion + Great Night Vision Work with Control4 and a QNap NVR (so ONVIF support) There market here is quite confusing, and I would love to hear what's worked for people. Products like the Eufy Flood looks great, but I don't think it supports ONVIF.

If I’m driving macros (“open all” / close all), having one butting is challenging - if the garage doors get to a mixed state (one up, one down), what behavior would it have? With 2 (open/close) there is no state management as the operations are idempotent - just hit close and I know I’m good. I’m open to a better way. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

After playing with the experience buttons, I think I like the custom buttons better. The quick sub menu ("Open/Close") seems easier on a T3 or iDevice than having a separate button for "Open Garage Doors" and "Close Garage Doors".

Ah, the "Selected" Event!! That does open up some possibilities. I had only played with the other events, as "Selected" looks odd.

I do this via my iDevices regularly. I've got a dozen Sharebridge instances setup ("Whole House", "Master Bedroom", "Greatroom", etc), and that lets me drive music from my devices. I *think* you could also do with on the android side with DLNA, although I've not been down that route. Your dealer can set this up for you.

Thanks Matt. I'm using the Aladdin buttons to control my doors - which gives me nice control over them. I've favorited them, but I've got multiple garage doors buttons (1st world problems, no doubt). I'm trying to just get down to a single button. The "Scenario - Experience Button" seems like exactly the thing.

@alanchow I've got multiple garage doors, and having a macro that opens/closes all them has been easiest.

To answer my own question: The "Scenario - Experience Button" is what I want. Per the docs, you rename the driver file, set the icon there, zip it back up, and install it. While this seems a bit clunky, it'll work and is what I'm doing to writing drivers anyway. I wonder if I could write a driver to do this, and expose the features to user-land? I've not yet poked at the "drivers installing other drivers" side of things, so I don't know if this is possible. The "UI Button" proxy seems nice, and I'll have to play with that. My garage doors are currently using the Aladdin buttons, and I'm looking for a "control all the doors at once" scene. I have found that easier to do in a macro ("All Doors up", "All Doors down"), than trying to cascade events across.

Is it possible to set the icon on a custom button? For example I have a "Garage Doors" custom button that opens/closes all the garage doors. I would like this button to have a garage door icon. Nothing obvious seems to work. Seems a simple driver with an icon would do the trick, and I could trigger my macros from that...

Using the Chowmein TCP driver, you could make a watch app that just triggered scenes pretty easily. URL X = Scene 1, URL Y = Scene 2, iWatch app has buttons to hit those URLs. ... but yet, integrated would be good.

Can you elaborate a bit? What sensors do you use? Is this all motion sensors, or are you using the roomme type solution and tracking based on a watch/phone?

I have a number of hue bulbs behind C4 switches. I have all the switches set to act as keypads, so that pressing on/off does not control load. Instead the “keypad” just triggers an advanced lighting scene (on / off / etc). I program a double-tap to control load, just in case I need to actually turn them on/off. This has worked out quite well. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Last night I changed all the passwords on my QNap. I went with long complex auto-generated passwords, that look like: (Password Example): Lkp#WEPU6QzdO?8)PvX6YAy1QxZaa2 Turns out the Control4 Network File Storage driver (or something in the network path) doesn't work with a password like that. After resetting the password to one simpler, shorter, and not having what appears to be forbidden characters, things connect and work again. The error was "Unable to connect to the network share". I put this here in the hope that the next person won't have to spend an hour of network debugging trying to figure that out.

Yea, more walled gardens. I’m Open to suggestions for a great solution. There’s gotta be something that works well. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This thread has details: UniFi Protect and Video/Legacy Camera Drivers https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/topic?share_fid=76380&share_tid=34841&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ec4forums%2Ecom%2Findex%2Ephp%3F%2Ftopic%2F34841-UniFi-Protect-and-Video-Legacy-Camera-Drivers&share_type=t&link_source=app Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There is a rich featured Unifi Protect driver someone has written for C4. I wonder if that would do the trick? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What is the groupthink for an NVR? I’ve been using QNAP for years, but their security exploits recently- and relative silence around them - has me looking for something different. (Last night was painful - my QNAP was totally compromised and the attack vector is unknown.) My ~15 cameras cameras are all Lilin. I’m not a big fan of Lilin, as their software update process doesn’t seem to exist (“release camera. Never update.”) cameras are all running ancient Linux versions and are likely easy to root. A deep C4 integration, and high reliability, are the primary features I’m looking for. Toying with moving over to the Unifi Protect system, as they at least have good software update & management practices. I’ve already got Unifi throughout the house, so adding seems reasonable. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The SR260 has a beautiful feature - it can beep when lost. This is programmed in via the "Beep Until Button Press" event. I'm trying to setup something similar for the NEEO, but there appears to be no "Beep" functionality. The NEEO Seems to have no such feature: Has anyone found a good solution for "Finding" the remote when lost? Short of putting a Tile on it (ick!), I'm not sure a good way to solve this... //Chris

I’m setting up files shares on the QNap now. The choice to stick with FAT32 is really unexpected. I would that that’s actually difficult to do, given the broad Linux support for NTFS, exFAT, and other file systems. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I've got a 256GB Thumbdrive full of music, and I'm trying to get an EA5 to recognize it. With the USB plugged into the back of an EA5, nothing happens. The C4 device simply fails to recognize it. The USB Drive is formatted as exFat (which is the Windows Default) and generally works fine with Linux based devices. In Composer, no device shows up. In the docs, I see this: USB flash drives or USB external hard drives must be formatted as FAT32 devices. That... can't possibly be right. FAT32 is ancient and not even supported by Windows anymore. Even back in 2010, it wasn't possible to format a FAT32 drive via Windows. Is there any option/solution I'm missing?

I would push for video support, personally. Would love to see the EA1 / EA3 / EA5 support the video aspects of Airplay.