Smart Lighting

Have you ever wanted to automate your lights so that the porch light always turns on 20 minutes after sunset and off at 1:00am? Do you want your lights to alter their brightness depending on the time of day? How about waking up as your bedroom lights slowly ramp up at your preset wake-up time? One button press can turn off all your lights at night or after kids all get off to school in the morning.

To install Control4 lighting dimmers, switches or keypads, 4Home Control or the homeowner only needs to take out the existing light switch and replace it with a Control4 equivalent. There are no wires to run at all! The lighting keypads communicate wirelessly back to the controller – making them part of a whole home lighting and automation system.

All Control4 light dimmers, light switches and button keypads have tri-color LEDs. This means you can change the color based on certain events occurring. For example, you could have a keypad LED glow red if the garage door is still open after 10:00pm.

What about tracking the time your son or daughter came home? If they arrived before their curfew, then the LED can be green. If they arrive after, it can glow red. What about having a master switch to turn off all lights in your home that you tap when you are about to leave?

With assistance from 4Home Control, you will be able to come up with many more situations in which Control4 will have a beneficial impact on your lifestyle.

The Wireless Switch and Wireless Dimmer

With Control4 Wireless Switch and Wireless Dimmers, elegant and convenient lighting control is finally affordable for every home. Packed with intelligent features and dramatically less expensive than competitive brands, the Control4 lighting range marks the beginning of a new era for home automation.

With its seamless wireless connectivity and ease of installation, the Control4 Wireless Switch or Dimmer works beautifully in any home, whether it’s 100 years old or brand new. This radical simplicity makes the Switch truly unique, and allows more people to enjoy the benefits of an automated home. The Wireless Dimmer is approved for up to 1,000 watts of power and can handle just about any home lighting situation.

Benefits of using Control4 for Lighting

  • Retrofittable: Lighting keypads and thermostat operate wirelessly. They simply use the existing wires from the existing traditional non-automated devices for power. This reduces both installation time and cost.
  • Independent control: Control4 lighting dimmers and switches can operate independently of a controller. The controller is simply used to give these devices automation capabilities.
  • Variable LED colors: The color of each LED on a keypad and light switch can be change independently whenever an event is triggered. It also allows you to better match these wall-mounted devices to the particular color of the room they reside in
  • Expandability: You can start by controlling one single light in your home, and expand it to automate and control all the lights in your home.
  • On screen display: Turn lights and climate control on and off using the convenient on-screen display, or use the remote or any other Control4 interface.
  • Robust wireless: ZigBee is used to ensure solid and trouble-free communications between automated devices.ZigBee is designed to work dependably by tolerating interference from the various electronic devices throughout you home.

How to connect lights to the Control4 system

Using the controller that we installed in the home theater, in combination with the whole home audio peripherals, and now the lighting controls, Control4 now provides the freedom to automate wakeup scenes. The climate control system can turn on a few minutes before you wake up to ensure a comfortable temperature. Then at the specified time, the lights can gradually ramp on and you can wake up to your favourite TV station, radio station or music album. All this can help you wake up more relaxed, comfortable and ready to start your day in a positive way.

The technical diagram shows one of the properties of the wireless lighting and climate control devices. They use ZigBee to communicate, which is the emerging standard, mesh wireless protocol. Devices that communicate using ZigBee automatically form into a "mesh network". This means that if one node/device is turned unavailable, the other devices will automatically find another path to talk to each other. It also means that as you increase the number of ZigBee devices you put around your home the more robust your network becomes.