GadgetBazza

I’d agree that the touchpad makes for a better experience in terms of quick startup and also available for all visitors, but they are slower to use that an iPad (if you ignore the startup time) and the fidelity of control of sliders on the touchscreens is rubbish by comparison. i have 7 touchscreens, 3 fixed and 4 portable, in 3 years I’ve had 4 failed units, only 2 of which were inside warranty, so I don’t expect to get much length of service from them. personally I wish there was a way I could overcome the need for the iOS app to reload the project data every time you switch to the app rather than maintain state, then I would replace all of my touchscreens with iPads as they fail. Only way I can think of is to not let the device sleep. From memory, the touchscreens are around £750, iPad starts at £329, other tablets cheaper still I suspect.

So my Jacuzzi is connected to the Wifi and not connected over cellular. It has the Prolink app, but this does require an annual subscription at £64.95 per year I believe. Reasons for integration are for power efficiency. I have a large solar setup here (26kW) and a lot of spare solar power during sunny days. I have a bunch of energy monitoring nodes and am just starting to use node-red to run workflows to change properties of certain power hungry devices that are not priority. I have a workflow running already which integrates with control4 that controls a pump running the pool pump via a relay switch. When there is excess solar the pool pump runs. I monitor the amount of run time during free solar hours, if the daily pump running time is not met, it runs the pumps for more time during the cheap rate night hours to make up the pump run time per day. For the hot tub, I would like control the temperature to govern the heater power usage using the same process. Rather than have to determine if I can reverse engineer the pro-link piece, if C4 was able to control the tub, I can use my existing integration code with C4 to adjust the tub temperature according to power availability. @South Africa C4 user you mention you have done this with a free driver? Can you confirm and please let me know the driver name? Do you have to maintain the ProLink subscription as well? Thanks Barry

Sorry to dig this up. the free driver that’s mentioned, does it require the Jacuzzi ProLink subscription to be maintained as well or does it talk to the spa direct?

Subscribing to this post as I've had two T3's go this way in the space of 2-3 months myself. First was sent for repair at C4 at a fixed cost of £260, they couldn't fix it and sent out a brand new replacement. That one was a wall mount using PoE, but I now have a 2nd gone the same way which is a wifi portable unit.

Ive had two T3's go this way in the last few months... In my examples, both T3's went through a 24-48 hour period of constantly crashing when completing boot up and restarting, before finally just getting stuck at the C4 icon / post screen. Dealer talked me through the reset pin process and I got a slightly different icon on screen (something like boot cannot load) and the dealer tried to re-flash the device remotely, but couldn't access it. They picked it up and tried to connect it to the system at their showroom, no joy. Next option was to send it to C4 for repair at a fixed cost of £260. They sent back a brand new unit as they couldn't fix it. As mentioned I now have another portable device gone exactly the same way on a system that's just over 2 years old. To be honest, the performance of T3 devices and the rip off price associated as well as the fact that I've already had two fail during warranty makes me think about looking at iPad with C4 app and no pass lock etc fitted in wall mounts or something... I wonder if anyone has done this and how it compares...

You're still avoiding my question! Also, that page was quite useful to see the status of the system and the touch panels, shame it's gone, I'm sure there was a more elegant solution than binning it.

Lots of electrical work going on requiring shutting down of the electricity supply. Not always required because of problems with the system. Not a fan of just pulling the plugs on computers. Besides, why should I have to wait for a dealer to be able to reboot a device if it's not behaving??? Any chance you can help with the question rather than redirecting?

Seems to be a bit of a drastic response. Would have been easy to come up with an alternate installation specific password. I've had a look around ComposerHE and can't see an option to reboot EA's. Anyone have any other options?

Bummer, what's the reasoning for that?! Any way for me to close down / reboot equipment gracefully now then?

Hi, Recently had an upgrade to latest OS3 version after a visit from my dealer (3.1.3 I think). Previously I used to be able to use a browser to connect to the IP address of my EA5 or EA1's and login using the non secret password where you can see the status of the controllers / touch screens etc. In particular, if I needed to shut down or reboot any of the EA's gracefully (eg for work on mains circuits) I could do this here, however since the upgrade, the EA's seem to only show a page regarding open source licenses being used by the EA units. Where's the old status / reboot page gone? Thanks Barry

Im not sure on the Infratech specs, but if there are two circuits (high and lo), then there will need to be 2 feeds, each providing half the power of the unit, so 4000W unit, two feeds of 2000W. I have a 6kW unit (not infra tech but another brand) which utilises two circuits at 3kW each, roughly 13Amp. We have these controlled by a C4 8 channel 16Amp relay. There are 4 inputs that can be wired on the unit, each with 2 outputs (that's the 8 way), each input can handle up to 16Amps across the two outputs related to it. So we wired, one 3kW heater feed to one of the first pair, and the second 3kW to the second pair, leaving roughly 3Amps of capacity on each of those pairs, so we have put low power lighting on each of the other two circuits to make use of the extra switching capacity if that makes sense. So basically as long as your load requirement doesn't exceed 16Amp, you should be able to use the C4 8 channel relay unit (non dimming version)? I wouldn't however recommend loading them at max current, particularly if there is an in-rush of current when the devices are switched on. I had a lighting puck rated for 400W which kept blowing with a 300W load of fluorescent lamps.

Thanks all, helpful responses. The ramp / led piece I guess is the obvious difference and possible snappy operation. I like the idea of consistency across different locations. we primarily have the switches in the bedrooms, but one also in the hallway by the front door which operates the garage doors, gates, house off and we all struggle to remember which is which already! i need to sit and think through what we need. thanks also for the tip on removing a binding by using the layout option.

Composer HE used here... So I’m still fiddling with the purposes of each of my buttons on my C4 Physical lighting switches. for buttons that don’t have anything assigned I can add programming in HE to do what I want. However if I want to unassign a button that turns a light on currently, there doesn’t appear to be anything I can see or do to achieve this. is this what is referred to as binding and only possible in Pro? if so, would it make sense to ask my dealer to remove all the light switch bindings and replace them with programming so that I can re -assign when I want to via programming or is this bad practice for some reason?

Hot water already covered. Ground source heated (electric) driven by 25kW of solar panels.... The matrix is using 3.6kWh a day unmanaged... or 25.2kWh a week, 109.2kWh a month. At Uk rates of 15p per kWh (and rising), it costs 55p a day, £3.78 per week or £16.38 per month, roughly £200 per year. The rest of the full rack uses 500w, there’s little I can do about this without sacrificing function, but the matrix is inefficient and idle. Home Automation (or building control systems) were always supposed to be as much about economy as well as convenience.

Just a heads up. Our Texecom Elite 168 panel had to be downgraded to a Texecom Elite 88 panel before the C4 integration stabilised. Not sure if anyone else has successfully got a 168 working?

I guess that’s a no then?

First off, Im an end user with ComposerHE (yeah I know...) So I have a Leaf LU862 HDMI matrix in my rack, connected via a Powerpak 8i. This thing runs at 150W all day long and there is no standby option / power management which is frankly a bit crap. I started off by tying in alarm events (arming / disarming) with controlling the Powerpak Outlet for the matrix. Obviously with this approach, I have to accept that it takes 2-3 minutes for the HDMI matrix to come back online in the project and any operation of TV's before that time may be met with no picture and having to room off and on again a few minutes later. I've also had to contend with the weekend scenario when I want a lie in and the kids want to watch TV in bed, so I've managed this with a scheduled event that powers on the socket if it's not already on at 6:55am on Saturday's and Sunday's... So far all this has been working without issue, however, since either my wife or I am at home most of the day during the week but we're not watching the TV's, the matrix is still on from when we disarm the alarm at around 6:30am until I go to bed around 1am... So I wanted to think about ways to manage this device further. Unfortunately, there is no power state event on the PDU port, only a Power level changed. This is a bit excessive for determining when a device is powered on or off, as it triggers every time the power consumption changes, which is constantly fluctuating. Since I don't like the idea of lots of events firing programming all the time with no purpose, my approach was to create a custom variable called HDMIMATRIX_POWER_STATE which is set to either OFFLINE / BOOTING / ONLINE. I created two macro's to turn on and off the PDU port and remind myself to use these wherever I want to manage the HDMI matrix power rather than directly controlling the PDU port. This way, the system variable will be updated as well as the PDU port controlled. When the Off macro is called, it sets the variable to OFFLINE and shuts down the PDU port. It also cancels the timer below if it is running. When the On macro is called, if the PDU port power = 0W then it sets the variable to BOOTING, and starts a HDMI booting timer. The HDMI booting timer, turns on the PDU port when the timer is started (3m 5s). When the timer expires, it sets the system variable to ONLINE. The above effectively gives me a power state variable for the HDMI matrix, but it is dependant on the device being responsive within the timer period set (which seems a bit hit and miss). 2 questions then.... Number 1, is there a better way to determine when the HDMI matrix is online / responding to my wait for 3m 5s timer currently? Number 2, once I have confidence in this variable, how am I going to handle watch requests when the device is not ONLINE? My thoughts on this thus far is to check the Watch button press on all rooms (bit of a pain) and if the device is not online, call the On macro, but then somehow I need to delay the Watch request until such time the device is online or use something like an announcement to tell the user that the HDMI matrix has just been started and to try again shortly? Any better ideas?

Have 5 SX switches and a PDU in my install for over a year now. Don't think I've ever experienced them resetting themselves to their default IP addresses.

Hi, can you confirm what SNMP version and community string are being used to retrieve these values? Im assuming v2 and public, but my PRTG isn't picking up any SNMP monitors from my EA5? Thanks

Thanks, thats sorted the licenses, showing as licensed now and Check-In success!

Right, realised that I should be looking at the DriverCentral Cloud properties, not my Sky box ones... Newbie here sorry. So in the drop down I have Check Drivers, Auto Update All On, Auto Update All Off, Restart Director as the options. Which one should I use to force check in? Thanks in advance. Barry

Hmm, my Sky box info looks different to yours... Only other options below this are for customising the Hash, Star, Menu, Cancel and Prev buttons....

Ahh, guess I'll be needing my dealer for that in the morning then... I only have ComposerHE. Thanks for quick reply anyhow.

How do I do that please?

So is this why my control of my Sky boxes has not been working this evening?