BXTR

On 4/13/2024 at 11:45 AM, KTCA said:

We had a Lutron system in a former home and hated it, because when something goes wrong, we lose lighting to the entire house and have to wait for the dealer to show up to reset it. Then the controller went bad & it would cost $5-$10k to replace it with a new unit, and need a dealer to install, service and repair. Lutron’s whole house lighting system is designed to keep the dealers in business and charge homeowners ridiculous fees to service the units.

We’re presently considering purchasing a resale home with a Lutron system in place and will adjust the purchase price down to reflect the cost of re-wiring the entire house back to a traditional light switch system. The house is a 3,800 sf single story, 5 bedroom, office, living, dining, family room, kitchen & breakfast nook. The question is what will be the cost of replacing the Lutron system with traditional switches, including fishing new lines, wall patching, painting, etc.  $10k $20k?

People fear what they don’t understand and I get that but this is unrealistic 

You’re looking at a renovation not a simple rewire 

6 hours ago, Navinag said:

I tried multiple reboots of bothe core 5 and DMX engine and all the serial ports. Rs232 to rs232 and also serial3 and serial 4 to ra232

So therefore i have tried serial 1 , serial 2 ,serial 3 and serial 4.

Possibly bad rs232 serial cable?

Thoughts?

 

Sounds like you have a bad engine, a few months ago I went through this, swapped out with a new one and it worked immediately. The defective one was purchased from Amazon so not sure what to do with it

Nifty mount but will really stink when it stops existing unless one has made peace with that fact already 

I would suggest disconnecting the sensor at the gate temporarily to see if the issue disappears 

If it does go away then the problem is the sensor

It could also be that the magnet is on the fringe of triggering the contact an a small movement of the gate by wind or whatnot is triggering the sensor

On 3/17/2024 at 3:36 AM, Don Cohen said:

Adding a voltage inserter does seem to work in quite a few cases. Curiously enough, when he was working with Bullet Train directly on this, they didn't suggest that he use one. When I mentioned that a voltage inserter often solves the problem, he looked for one made by them, he couldn't find a way to buy one or even if they had one. He was (understandably) a bit reluctant to use a 3rd party one.

And strangely enough, his Tributaries cable came with their own voltage inserter, which he used, but still didn't get a reliable connection. I think I read just recently that one had to use the Tributaries power supply for that inserter, rather than just a USB port on another device. That seems a bit odd, but who knows. I'm not sure if he did that or not.

What voltage inserter did you use with the Bullet Train cable?

I just used a generic one from Amazon. The other thing which was essential to make it reliable in my case was to update the projector. There was an update last Aug or around there that increased compatibility with JVC & many fiber HDMI cables

On 3/7/2024 at 4:22 PM, Don Cohen said:

In general, I would agree with everything you've said, and Bullet Train is a go-to brand for HDMI woes. That said, I have not found any brand or cable type that has been 100% reliable with higher bandwidth.

I'm working now with someone needing 48gbps (madVR Envy to JVC NZ8, using MotionAI at 4k/HDR/120 fps). His run is around 10 meters. He bought 2 Bullet Train cables rated for 48 gbps and neither worked. Ironically, he has an older Bullet Train cable, 15 meters, rated at 18 gbps, and it runs 4k/HDR/120 fps without breaking a sweat.

The bottom line is that HDMI is a crap shoot, especially when you get over 30 feet, and passive cables aren't an option. This doesn't say anything negative at all about Bullet Train, as they're generally better than most. But it does mean anybody buying a more expensive cable should clarify the return policy, because problems arise, regardless of brand or price.

I actually have an RS3100, madVR and the same bullet train cable(15m though), it works but needed a voltage inserter at the madVR

We also have a client with an RS4100, madVR and an Audioquest CherryCola 15m, also no issues once we added a voltage inserter

I’d use the Experience Button driver for that. You could even program the colors to mimic whatever the keypad buttons do

Your frustration is misplaced, the person you SHOULD be blaming is the person who bought the driver for you… for not telling you how it works and also for not taking care of you. 
 

FYI - DC doesn’t suck 

The cloud driver needs a code from drivercentral so if you can’t login to drivercentral then you’re out of gas

I’ve seen this as well except that it appeared to happen after a rack power cycle. A zone would be on, music playing for no particular reason even though navigators say everything is off

Turning the zone on then off again would resolve it until the next power cycle

That was last summer and there was a matrix firmware update last fall and I haven’t seen the issue crop up since so maybe ensure that the matrix is up to date 

MyQ just removed compatibility with Clare which was an official integration 

Is there anything stopping MyQ from working with C4 (thru the Intrinsic driver)at some point down the road?

18 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

Idk. You like 10pm calls on a Saturday night? 

That would kind of suck and we typically don’t get those but is there a certain demographic or system size where the client would call at an unreasonable hour?

The one time we did get that call….. the old “nothing works” on a Sunday night from our biggest client who’s only 10 minutes away. He was right, nothing worked. A water line above the rack leaked and water managed to get into the primary controller. So Assist wouldn’t have been able to do anything in that situation anyway

If you’re really concerned about audio quality, look at SeymourAV, their XD material is phenomenal and the image quality is fantastic

Perforated screens like Stewart seriously hinder audio, they even have electronics you’d put in the signal path to compensate 

Woven screens like Seymour and other don’t need compensation because they don’t affect the sound much

There’s a reason that the high end booths at CEDIA and mastering studios are moving away from perforated….

Part of the reason for this program is because there are so many C4 owners that have been abandoned by their dealer or have had conflict and parted ways, this gives the customer a way to deal with C4 to have issues resolved although I’m not sure how that’s going to go with how we’ve seen some systems are put together… they need a bomb not tech support

Another aspect is to let the integrator work on new jobs and not get bogged down with service requests which I think is a complete crock of crap, if you’re so bad at putting systems together and business in general that you can’t figure out how to put together a reliable system then service the minor issues that might crop up then C4 should have a mechanism is place to at least delist that dealer from the dealer locator

It’s embarrassing that Assist is becoming a thing but it speaks to the quality of dealers in general and not the C4 product which we find to be quite reliable. Other snap products like their amps and hdmi extenders are piss poor and we haven’t used them for a number of years

I like the idea of what this product does

I’m not excited that Snap has yet to announce what the 3 year license cost is for this thing to continue to work 

Is it $100 or $1000, all I’ve heard is crickets

It sounds like the dealer didn’t ask you the right questions when designing a system for you, quite frankly just reading what you have to say checks all the “not a good fit” boxes 

1. It sounds like you like to be not dependent on a dealer to do things for you… the C4 model is overall the opposite of this. Your dealer didn’t recognize that for whatever reason

2. If your dealer cannot find an HDMI extender that actually works as it’s supposed to then I’d either think that they’re fairly green or there’s an issue with the a/v receiver

3. Much of your dissatisfaction is due to integration with when/then and Alexa which IMO is not great  99.9% of our clients don’t have the patience to try to use when/then, they just text, call or email with requests. Personally I’m not a fan of Alexa because I think a 95% success rate on commands isn’t acceptable much less the other issues with one cloud trying to talk to another cloud

I’m not sure if things have changed but there was also a sizeable buy in when we became dealers 

You need a dealer and you will have a heck of a time finding a good one if you’re providing the equipment and network 

I don’t mean this question in a negative way but what made you think this was a diy solution?

A quality dealer will help you steer clear of ideas that you think might be good but aren’t and also ensure that you end up with a stable, reliable and easy to use system on top of ensuring you have the right infrastructure and parts to keep it that way for a long time 

If you have a madVR you’ll want to keep that only in the theater system. There’s no avoip system that will be able to preserve what benefits the madVR offers

With the madVR motionAI beta pushing out 120fps and actually requiring a 48gbps video cable to function, there’s no video matrix that can accept that without a lot of compression 

AVPro is a killer product, highly recommended, extremely reliable 

Weird, second bizarre question from a one post member this week… 

Anyway, if you’re looking for a system that is DIY, C4 is not the one for you

Sounds like you have what might be a poor quality install or a poor combination of equipment 

With that said;

Using Tidal has got to be the easiest thing ever on the C4 app, pick music, pick tidal, pick playlist and go. I’m not trying to be an arse but what difficulty are you having?

You mention that “nobody” could get HDMI over cat6 to work, what does that mean? Have other dealers looked at the system?

Perhaps post a picture of the rack, front and back. This will help us answer dozens of questions once we see what’s there and how it’s put together. 

5 hours ago, penn65000 said:

With Lutron too? We have another home with same gen but newer C4 multibutton wireless and this doesn’t happen. 

I can’t speak to Lutron as we don’t work with it, just with C4 lighting. It’s fairly rare, over the course of a decade we’ve noticed it seems to only happen on sites that have generators, new, old, big, small, it doesn’t mater

15 hours ago, penn65000 said:

Backup gen is clean. Modern Generac gen and no other electronics are impacted. 

It isn’t. I’ve seen this happen at many sites

Try a 15 tap on top button to reset

Its likely dirty power from the backup generator causing the issue 

5 hours ago, GregCAMS said:

Definitely not rich but just saved up weekly for a few months to get the initial Strato S and then slowly upgraded from there.  Before then had the original CinemaOne before the 1 day KScape went out of business and restarted.  The content is owned so never lost it.  There are integrators much more familiar than me on this topic but definitely prefer the stability, performance, reliability, and service with Kaleidescape.  And now, compared to then, they have licensing agreements and two-way feedback with each of the studios.  

It’s definitely a pill to swallow but I have not looked back since getting K either

It works well and the quality of the media sooo good. I’ve seen 1080p movies on K look good enough that an untrained eye might mistake it for 4K