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What Did You Automate Today?


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3 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said:

Nice! Would probably be too bright for me... but I love the idea!

Fortunately, being OCD, I can figure out the rainbow colours easily.  I though of moving to red, orange green (robot colours) if rainbow colours was too much but I am already loving my rainbow colours and translating the time easily in my head - I am not quite sure what that says about me though!

Nope. Projects in red and is dimmable. Can project to ceiling or opposite wall. If my wife can handle it trust me its not intrusive at all. Bonus can also get outside temp 

Amazon search = projection clock

 

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Like me, I think the whole idea of the led color changes is that [mention]South Africa C4 user [/mention] has difficulty reading a clock, and perhaps even a projected image of time and/or temp if he wakes during the night. Therefore, the led colors make sense. I like the idea personally because I too have to reach and stumble for my glasses (it’s really quite disruptive to my sleep pattern) to figure out what time it is and how much more sleep time I have. And, I too have a strange relationship with colors. I see numbers and hear sounds in color. Until I was 10 years old, I thought everyone did. I have what’s referred to as synesthesia. So for me, this is wonderful. And by the way, having synesthesia isn’t a curse or handicap in anyway. I’m actually rather thankful. I can solve complex equations in my head in seconds. It’s almost as though I’m looking at a wondrous piece of art while I’m solving. The only complaint is that all through school, including law school, I was like a circus sideshow :P.


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I like the idea of using the coloured lights.  I have considered this with some outdoor RGB light strips - changing the colour each hour or half hour.

Another geeky thing to do would be to use LEDs to construct a binary clock.  If you just cared about the hour through the night you could use 4 LEDs to indicate the hours, assuming tht you could differentiate between on and off states for the LED.  Or use red for off and blue for on, or something similar.

Binary+joke+because+01100110011101010110

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  • 2 weeks later...

Made a "Happy birthday" (Or cake day for those across the pond) scene in the rooms we most commonly celebrate the Kitchen and Keeping (Den off the Kitchen). Takes snapshot, Lowers shades, dims lights, stops music/TV/ etc for 1 min to sing, then all goes back way it was. I need to find a 30 sec mp3 or wave of Happy Birthday and I'll add in that announcement too. 

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20 hours ago, RyanE said:

I did something similar in my office, made webhooks to control the fan speed, which I then used shortcuts on my Linux Desktop panel to trigger.

RyanE

@RyanE @eggzlot @msgreenf can someone please tell me what I would need to do to set up webhooks to interact with C4. I too like this idea for my home office. Hoping I do not need to open up my firewall to make it work. Thanks so much.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I installed a Serena shade in the master bathroom over the tub (would've been very hard to reach). Added two more to the master bedroom, also. Added some voice commands, Sunshine and Privacy to open/close. Scheduled the blinds to close at bedtime. Setting up the two that face the morning sun to open incrementally as the sunrises. Added some voice commands that simplifies everything for her. Not that exciting, but "happy wife" applies here, for sure.

 

 

 

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I should have done this simple bit of automation years ago... it has given my family great satisfaction. Previously all (5) of my T3s had photos as screensavers (except for the main bedroom which blanked out when the lights were out and the blinds closed) and the spa area T3 (which had no screen saver if we were monitoring a camera - if we are using the jacuzzi and sauna but expected someone to arrive we press a button to display the front door camera or the front gate camera on the T3).

I upgraded my screensaver logic to continue as above but when music is playing in the relevant zone, instead of photos (if the screensaver is allowing photos - ie not blank or off) it shows the album artwork, time, date and temperature.  A simple change which is creating a lot of happiness...

The most complex part of the change was bringing all of the old logic (main bedroom and spa area) into one area (Macro).  Once this was done, it took minutes to make the change and, is easy to edit in future.

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Ring has Halloween chimes. Don't know if it this is new this year or not. But I turned up the volume on the chime to the max and put a spooky sound on the motion alert and then another on the doorbell press. UPS guy loved it. First Halloween in this neighborhood so we're hoping the neighborhood grandkids will visit and trick or treat out here in the boonies.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Today I completed the linking of my Victron solar system to Control4.  A big thank you to a couple of Victron experts who helped me.

This was done with Yatun’s Modbus driver (which required significant learning on my part as I had not really heard of Modbus until recently).

The most important part of the automation is that I have a macro in Control4 which increases my grid usage when the battery starts to get depleted and reduces the grid usage as the battery builds up towards full capacity.  The reason this is needed is that without this, the settings on the Victron system either keep the battery full but then don’t use the full benefits of the solar panels when solar power created exceeds demand for power, or the settings allow the battery to deplete to a setpoint after which the house relies on grid only (in, say, bad weather).  This would work for most cases, but in my instance, my potential power draw (if I have the sauna, Aircons, steam room, jacuzzi and chiller all running at the same time- which is often the case as this is a holiday home) is about 30% greater than what the grid can supply.  Thus, I always need some capacity (above the minimum setpoint)  on the battery to draw on when power utilisation is high. I have a fairly complicated algorithm (which probably needs fine tuning) which (I think) will keep the battery between 60% and 80% in almost all scenarios and thus maximize the use of solar at the same time as leaving capacity for hours with lots of utilisation.  The algorithm uses the battery level as well as whether certain heavy equipment (sauna / steam room) is on to determine how much grid power to use. The algorithm also turns off the pool heaters in the event of the battery dropping below 50%...

Other, ancillary benefits and automation include:

1. A voice announcement if there is a power cut and when power returns;

2. the backlights of all the dimmers and switches in my public areas turn red for the duration of a power cut (batteries and solar can keep my critical systems - including all Control4 equipment - up for days - probably ad-infinitude barring a solid month of really bad weather).

3. I have a thermostat which displays the battery backup level as a percentage (as it is a 100KWh battery, this also displays the number of kWhs remaining in the battery).

 

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Not as involved as solar but did program led on music keypad to change based on station in a few rooms. Automatically linked den w kitchen if source is Tivo or Roku for audio, volume, and power off. Found almost always in the kitchen when these sources are used. But only links of kitchen is already off. 

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On 10/10/2020 at 11:19 PM, South Africa C4 user said:

Today I completed the linking of my Victron solar system to Control4.  A big thank you to a couple of Victron experts who helped me.

This was done with Yatun’s Modbus driver (which required significant learning on my part as I had not really heard of Modbus until recently).

The most important part of the automation is that I have a macro in Control4 which increases my grid usage when the battery starts to get depleted and reduces the grid usage as the battery builds up towards full capacity.  The reason this is needed is that without this, the settings on the Victron system either keep the battery full but then don’t use the full benefits of the solar panels when solar power created exceeds demand for power, or the settings allow the battery to deplete to a setpoint after which the house relies on grid only (in, say, bad weather).  This would work for most cases, but in my instance, my potential power draw (if I have the sauna, Aircons, steam room, jacuzzi and chiller all running at the same time- which is often the case as this is a holiday home) is about 30% greater than what the grid can supply.  Thus, I always need some capacity (above the minimum setpoint)  on the battery to draw on when power utilisation is high. I have a fairly complicated algorithm (which probably needs fine tuning) which (I think) will keep the battery between 60% and 80% in almost all scenarios and thus maximize the use of solar at the same time as leaving capacity for hours with lots of utilisation.  The algorithm uses the battery level as well as whether certain heavy equipment (sauna / steam room) is on to determine how much grid power to use. The algorithm also turns off the pool heaters in the event of the battery dropping below 50%...

Other, ancillary benefits and automation include:

1. A voice announcement if there is a power cut and when power returns;

2. the backlights of all the dimmers and switches in my public areas turn red for the duration of a power cut (batteries and solar can keep my critical systems - including all Control4 equipment - up for days - probably ad-infinitude barring a solid month of really bad weather).

3. I have a thermostat which displays the battery backup level as a percentage (as it is a 100KWh battery, this also displays the number of kWhs remaining in the battery).

 

@South Africa C4 userThat's very interesting! Could you let me know how you physically connected the Modbus of the solar system to Control4. 

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10 hours ago, maskas said:

@South Africa C4 userThat's very interesting! Could you let me know how you physically connected the Modbus of the solar system to Control4. 

The Victron solar system is on the same network as Control4.  So all we had to do was turn on Modbus on the Victron control panel and use the Yatun Modbus TCP IP driver which communicates over the lan.  Yatun has an other native Modbus driver which (I think) communicates over a serial connection but I have not used it.

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15 minutes ago, South Africa C4 user said:

The Victron solar system is on the same network as Control4.  So all we had to do was turn on Modbus on the Victron control panel and use the Yatun Modbus TCP IP driver which communicates over the lan.  Yatun has an other native Modbus driver which (I think) communicates over a serial connection but I have not used it.

Thanks, I'll look into the serial driver.

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  • 1 month later...

Added 3 Lighting Points using the great Shelly 1L devices with regular LED Lamps and retiring Xiaomi WiFi Lamps instead.  These Shelly’s 1L require no neutral wire and this is exactly what I was missing at the switches 😃

Used it with Shelly Bypass at the lamps and it’s just amazing ...

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Just now, Amr said:

Added 3 Lighting Points using the great Shelly 1L devices with regular LED Lamps and retiring Xiaomi WiFi Lamps instead.  These Shelly’s 1L require no natural wire and this is exactly what I was missing at the switches 😃

Used it with Shelly Bypass at the lamps and it’s just amazing ...

I also used Shelly 3i to automate 3 blinds, another great device from Shelly 😊 Happy holidays to all ...

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  • 2 weeks later...

So last couple days automated some stuff on my saltwater aquarium. I have TP link wattage sensing outlets. When tank goes into feed mode the sump underneath fills and usually sets off over volume alarm on my automated top off. Now when the wattage decreases to allow feed mode the ATO turns off, when wattage increases again ATO turns on. Also have notifications built in for under/over wattage so I know if any of the life support equipment is drawing too little or too much power and could be at risk of failure (or has failed). 

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