Jump to content
C4 Forums | Control4

Erratic/Unreliable C4 behavior


TundraSonic

Recommended Posts

We've a new house w/ a new C4 system (July 2020). We've been experiencing a lot of erratic and unreliable behavior from the beginning.

- Lighting scenes will sometimes not fully execute or will execute in a different order than it should based on programming in advanced lighting. For instance, one that we use almost every night turns down a bunch of lights for watching TV. It works as expected about half the time and the other half in various unexpected ways. Similarly, a lighting scene that turns off all of the lights in our bathroom except for one nightlight will sometimes leave one or two lights on. These are C4 dimmers BTW.

- Media sessions will not turn off. We've had maybe 6 or 7 instances of a session requiring numerous tries to turn it off. A couple of times we could not turn the sessions off.

- Dimmers (C4-DIN-8DIM-E-V2)not responding or responding only after several seconds delay. Shades not responding. Both work about 90+% of the time. Do not work perhaps 5-10% of the time. There is one instance where a group of dimmers (lighting in scullery) nearly always takes several seconds to respond. Others are sporadic.

- Sliders (lighting dimmer, audio zone) move themselves. More: 

These are in addition to sometimes very slow T3 response. 

We have rebooted the central EA5 a number of times. That doesn't seem to make any difference.  

As a few on here have pointed out, this is not an exceptionally large or complicated system. It also does not have very much programming (yet, which concerns me).

System:

- Central EA5 + IO extender

- 2 remote EA5's + 3 EA1's + 1 CA1

- 9 C4-DIN-8DIM-E-V2 modules

- 2 T3's

- 33 6-button keypads

Ideas on what could be causing all of this? 

Thanks,

Link to comment
Share on other sites


What’s your network setup? 
 

pretty much all the problems you’ve described points to network, the c4 lighting modules also communicate via the network which is probably why you’re having some very eratic behaviour. 
 

secondly there could also be a zigbee issue, if any of your keypads are zigbee that is. I’d change to ch 25 to see if that makes a difference. 
 

thanks 

Muj 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks. I'm very open to it being network related (and would actually be thrilled if it was because that is something that I can control). What would it be though?

ALL of this is on the same VLAN/Subnet/Switch - a Unifi Switch Pro 48 Gen 2. This switch is very lightly loaded and both CPU & Mem usage sits near zero much of the time. I'm not aware of any keypads that are not ethernet (and same VLAN/Subnet/Switch as all EA's, all dimmers, etc.). 

Thanks,

Link to comment
Share on other sites

good point, you're saying that everything you are using is communicating over the network, you're not using Control4 handheld remotes which use zigbee right?

curious why you have 3 EA5's anyways? along with 3 EA1's?  sounds like you got oversold but who knows what you are doing there.  I've done large systems but never felt the need to use 3 EA5s.  

Regardless, I'd be happy to remote in to your system and have a look and see if anything jumps out at me in terms of the configuration being wrong.  PM me if interested...of course I charge for my time but it might be worth having another set of (experienced) eyes on it.

To clarify, the keypads themselves don't communicate over ethernet, but rather RS485.  those commands are converted to network commands via the Bus Ethernet Gateway device which sits in your lighting panel typically.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks. I'm fairly certain that all of the keypads are wired. At least to the extent that they did have multi-pair to each location and I assume he used them. Thanks for the 485 reminder.

We do have 7 SR-260 remotes and that I assume all use Zigbee to their local EA/CA? The issues we're seeing however are mostly when using the T3's to make adjustments to light or audio levels. When a remote is involved it's to trigger a scene or macro and this seems reliable in that something always happens, it seems to always trigger the scene/macro. The problem is after it's triggered the execution varies but the remote and Zigbee should no longer be involved as at this point it should be just the EA5 and 8Dims talking.

(That said, we do have some other issues with media not always turning on successfully like 'watch ATV' in our living room will turn on the TV and sometimes it sees the ATV and sometimes not (remote on iPhone sees the ATV and indicates it's successfully talking to it but nothing on the TV). But this is a separate, and minor in terms of PITA, issue.)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Question on network broadcast issues. These are all persistent devices (EA5, T3's and 8Dims) and would be expected to be persistent devices. Typically, unless necessary, calls between them would be discreet address calls, not broadcasts. So when I adjust a light level down that T3 should be making discreet address calls to the EA5, not broadcasting?  Similarly, the EA5 should know about each and every T3 so in updating status it would use discreet address calls, not broadcast.

Similarly, when the EA5 talks to the 8Dims it should be making discreet address calls. I could see where someone might say we need to have a bunch of dimmers doing stuff so we'll just broadcast and let those who it applies to pick up the chits but that places a burden on every device on the network for almost imperceptible savings in the EA5 (a few minor lookups). This is assuming that the dimmers are smart enough to handle ramps internally so that they receive a level, ramp rate and start time as a single packet and not a bunch of 'dim 1%' commands.

Even if they are broadcasting to the 8dims (and the 8dims back to the single EA5?)... These are all the same Switch/VLAN/Subnet so there should be no problems with those broadcasts. And considering that these are things that work 90+% of the time or 99+% of the time I'd think if there were broadcast problems that we'd have much worse problems?

Just trying to understand better how C4 are using the network and how it could be so affected by network issues when other stuff that uses massively greater bits of the network are not affected.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

Turn off sleep on the apple tv 

Did that some time ago. I think at your suggestion 🙂

The ATV is awake and the remote apps on iPhones indicate that they can see it and talk to it but nothing on the screen. Sometimes it comes up eventually on its own, sometimes manually switching inputs back and forth does it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, TundraSonic said:

Did that some time ago. I think at your suggestion 🙂

The ATV is awake and the remote apps on iPhones indicate that they can see it and talk to it but nothing on the screen. Sometimes it comes up eventually on its own, sometimes manually switching inputs back and forth does it. 

What version apple tv? Tv os? And what version driver?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Let's take the simplest problem - a media session not turning off. This should involve only the T3 and EA5. I click session off, T3 sends a packet to the EA5 with a change state to OFF bit in it, EA5 executes. Overall quite simple.

In reality there s/b some check work around it. If the T3 doesn't get a correct status update back from the EA5 within xx microseconds it sends the packet again. And then maybe a third time. If it continues to not get a proper response then it should display an error message on the T3 to the user about it. None of this seems to be happening.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, msgreenf said:

That sounds like network problem to me. But I do have to convince. Unifi networking gear is on the c4 do not use list cause it creates issues but it can be properly configured. 

The erratic behavior or ATV?  Let's leave the ATV thing off this thread for now and just focus on the erratic behavior. If it is network, then how?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

BTW, thank you guys for the help. I don't mean to be pedantic but I'm struggling to figure out how the network could be a problem. If it is then that'd be great and hopefully an easy fix but what C4 are doing is very simple and extremely low bandwidth on a lightly loaded network w/ gobs of bandwidth to spare. These same network components successfully handle massively more complicated and higher bandwidth applications without problems so I'm struggling a bit.

If stuff needed to cross sub/vlan boundaries then there could certainly be config issues there but that's not the case here that I know of.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.