Crustyloafer

I would have said >$250 would be a bare minimum, but it depends on if you are going to it a bunch of old/used kit second hand and then find a dealer willing to even consider programming it for you. Sure you can get remote programming services from some guys on here but that is then reliant on you being able to physically install and connect everything up yourself correctly. If you want it supplied, installed and programmed then you are going to need a local dealer and they are not going to want to touch anything they didn’t supply.

1. Yes, good native Alexa integration with C4 is available, you just need to have an active 4Sight subscription. 2. Don't waste your time with the matrix amp, they are old and effectively an end of line product. The current Triad AMS8 audio matrix and PAMP8 power amp are a much better performing combination. 3. You'll want to get an EA-3 for the audio outputs, the EA-1 only has a single HDMI output for audio and video and no analogue or digital audio only outputs. You could use an EA-1 but you would also have to use a HDMI audio extractor to feed audio into the audio matrix and you would only have a single stream of audio available for all zones. 4. Far better to have all your iTunes music stored on a NAS drive with Twonky or other DLNA media server on it to index the music and playlists and then use the Control4 DLNA driver to link to system. 5. How long is a piece of string, cost of programming is dependent on so many different factors it's impossible to even give you an estimate. Get in touch with a dealer and get a quote for supply and install/programming.

Where are you located?

There is not a publicly published list. Where are you located and what items are you looking for prices of?

As above, Toast notifications on LG TVs via the awesome Annex4 driver are the way to do this.

Take a look into SightHound. Only $250 for unlimited camera licence, you just need a small NUC to run the software on and then you can get it to store 20 second event based clips either locally or in the cloud storage of your choice. https://www.sighthound.com/products/sighthound-video Support for a wide range of cameras as well as IFTTT integration means you can program from any of the chosen camera's integration capabilities as well as SightHound events.

Where are you based? US, UK, other? Happy to discuss all or your questions.

It depends on what sort of video performance you are after and what type of video/audio signals you need to be able to transmit. If you want to distribute 1080P or 4K signals in a visually lossless manner with 5.1 or Dolby Atmos then some of the lower cost solutions will not have the required bandwidth to do this on top on a data network already in use or if they do it will be at the severe detriment of the data network performance. The Blustream Multicast solution squeezes 4K/UHD down into a stream just under 1Gbps using a visually lossless compression method. HDBaseT transmits an uncompressed 4K/UHD signal with zero latency and bi-directional control signals, audio return and ethernet into a 10Gbps stream max.

I'm assuming they are all forward phase dimmers, which whilst they work fine with some LED loads, however I have found most LED loads tend to prefer reverse phase dimming controls. I'm not sure what min and max level adjustments there are on those older dimmers, someone else with more experience of them may be able to contribute and confirm.

As Dinushan has also suggested, if you go for more sophisticated control methods such as DMX you can get full control in 0.5% increments across the entire 0-100 range.

Lots of good quality dimmable LEDs bulbs out there. The Megaman range I've used offer useable dimming right down about 4-5% and then max out at about 70% on the uncalibrated 0-100 dimming scale of the C4 dimmers. Once the max and min levels have been set correctly on the dimmer channel's properties to much these lower and upper limits the C4 dimmers offer smooth and usable dimming throughout the 0-100 slider range. So, either you are not buying good enough LEDs or your dimmers are not calibrated correct to match their input level/brighness ratios.

I have to say I agree, by avoiding the use of available IP drivers you are making life very difficult for yourself, not the best way to go about things for someone just starting with C4. Whilst with TVs a basic IR driver will usually suffice, I use a custom made IR driver for almost all Samsung TVs as it just works. However for devices like AVRs, IP control gives you so much more functionality, discrete power and volume control and tracking, discrete zone, surround mode and often speaker profile settings. Any devices you want to control via network, but do not want access to the internet, just put them either on a separate VLAN or even easier, just setup their IP setting manually on the device and enter dummy non-existent DNS Server addresses. That way it can communicate on the local network but not connect to the internet.

Also, some great Facebook Groups too, I get some of the fastest and most useful responses to some of my queries on there. https://www.facebook.com/groups/control4programming/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/Control4Programmers/

Strange it was left out of training. Welcome to the club Jake, please do not hesitate to ask about any other questions you might have, although personally you would be better off asking them on of the official C4 Forums which are for dealers only. There is a good mix of C4 dealers/programmers, driver developers and end users on here, but if you are a registered dealer then you might get more appropriate answers to some of your questions on the official forums.

This is C4 programming 101 and covered in the 5 day automation programmer training required by all C4 dealers/technicians.