New Driver Mates Crestron Lighting with Control4 Automation
14/Feb/2011 05:13 Filed in:
Industry News
Just in time for Valentines, new driver mates Crestron Lighting with Control4 Automation. Especially valuable for retrofit jobs, Extra Vegetables® Control4® driver for Crestron® lighting allows you to integrate a Crestron lighting system with keypads into Control4. This provides the same features and customer experience as Control4's native lighting control. You can dim and switch loads and there is also the facility to represent Crestron relays as motorization devices within Control4. The driver is IP based.
Crestron keypads are fully supported by the driver. It is possible to add custom programming to key presses on the Crestron keypads within the Control4 system. So keys not used for lighting operations could be used for AV or other control purposes.
by CEPro:Crestron makes some fine lighting controls, but currently it is challenging to integrate the lighting with a non-Crestron control system.
Extra Vegetables, a U.K.-based Control4 solutions provider, has developed a driver enabling users to control their Crestron lighting system with Control4 touchscreens and other interfaces.
During Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) earlier this month, EV principal Simon Scotland told CE Pro, “A lot of dealers do like Crestron lighting. We’ve been getting a lot of requests for it [a driver], so we made it.”
He adds that the software is particularly useful for retrofit jobs in which Crestron lighting has already been installed.
EV marketing director Jane Scotland explains, “In the same way that Control4 dealers have been able to specify Lutron, Clipsal and Rako lighting alongside Control4’s own offerings, we have now extended this to include Crestron lighting as well.”
The EV software works like a keypad emulator for Crestron controls, so you won’t get the full functionality of an all-Crestron solution, according to Jane Scotland: “The driver is only designed for simple key-press communications from the Crestron environment to the Control4 one. This is enough for lighting and simple AV control.”
The driver also allows the recall of lighting scenes defined within the Crestron system and control over the vacation scheduler.
Tags: Lighting, Control4, Crestron
