I recently bought a house where everything is controlled by a Control4 system. I hate this because I cannot customize anything on my own and have to pay someone else to do it. I also have Alexa devices all over the house, but I have to pay $100 per year to use them with Control4 🤬🤬🤬
I know I can change the light switches to compatible ones, but I don’t know how to do that with the motorized blackouts and the propane fireplace. Can someone please help me? I don’t want to be a hostage to Control4!
I’m slowly replacing my Control4 system with DIY.
The hardest part for me has been finding a good controller that is powerful but doesn’t require you to make HA a second full-time job (looking at you Home Assistant).
I’m hoping Samsung will come out with a good Matter controller soon.
As long as you are not doing AV distribution, you can pretty easily replace everything C4 does with DIY hardware.
I haven’t touched or upgraded my HA for over 8 months and everything still works fine.
You can do AV distribution too…lots of ways.
Show me how to control an HDMI matrix and multi-channel amp through Alexa or similar consumer controller.
If you want to DIY AV distribution you probably need Home Assistant, very specific hardware it support and a lot of time to learn how. With Control4 you just plug in the hardware, tell it which channels are wire to which rooms and you are done.
Hi, With myServer, assuming you get hardware that is supported, this is all very well supported. We do video and audio matrices every day for our commercial sports bar / restaurant business.
The description of the control4 experience is close to a myServer experience, but not quite. It’s not as easy as that, but the idea is the same. myServer is MUCH more customizable than Control4 so it’s a little more involved.
Each device / channels are associated to a room. When you choose that room, then the system assumes you want to watch video in that room. So, the Outputs are made “active” for that room. You then choose a video source (like “Roku”). This then sets the Active video input. Behind the scenes, myServer tells the HDMI matrix to set that Input to that Output. And then you are watching your Roku (in your equipment rack) in your Living Room (the room you selected).
With the SmartRemote, you can choose that room, indicate it’s YOU (not your significant other) and that you want to watch Roku. The rest is done using the programming like described above. An emulator of this experience is available at https://allonis.com
And if this is what you want to implement, your timing is good because we have an active Kickstarter for what you would need at a greatly discounted prices:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1957275162/smartremote-a-customizable-remote-control
Feel free to ask further questions!!!