I’m looking into migrating from a 22 year old bespoke automation system to C4. I’ve been in software development for over 35 years and want to be involved with the design of the new system, in conjunction with an installer that I’ve already spoken with.
We have a ton of dry contact light switches. It will be painful to replace them all (they're mostly in landscape orientation), so I want to consider the viability of a PLC (or similar mass input device) for some portion of the inputs (maybe 80% of the 106 switches). We have around 32 relays for fans, non-dimmable lights, etc.
I’m thinking about a combination of 4 or 5 IO extenders to support all the relays and some of the dry contact inputs for the lights, plus a PLC for the remaining light inputs that we’re not going to upgrade to C4 native switches.
I have to admit that I don't know much about PLCs or the standards used to communicate with them. If anyone has suggestions for a PLC direction that works well with C4, I'd be very interested.
I think we can connect our existing DMX commercial dimmer packs to the C4 via a eDMX1 Pro that I already own, but have not deployed (I was messing around with it).
All of our alarm inputs go into our automation system. The installer has recommended installing a modern alarm system, moving the inputs from the old automation system to the alarm. The C4 system would talk to the alarm and use the motion sensors to drive the lights. We’d need the alarm system itself to not use the motion sensors as an alarm trigger most of the time. The window and door sensors would be used as triggers.
We use card key access (HID) readers and electric door strikes to enter the house. Basically our automation system works in conjunction with a server that maintains a list of valid cards. I assume that there's some sort of way to integrate card readers into C4, but haven't turned up very much with light searching. Probably this is an area where our installer can help, but in the interests of informing myself I'd be interested in any suggestions for integrating card key access into C4.
We have several crappy amber monochrome low resolution touch panels. They're all wired with CAT5 (WiFi wasn't a thing back then), so I can drive drive shiny new panels with POE. That part seems easy.
Any thoughts regarding these overall directions?
If anyone is interested, I can provide more details.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.