These guys have been with Control4 from the beginning and they do it (projects) better than most Crestron or AMX guys. They offer system monitoring packages too.

The ONLY thing we sell is OURSELVES!

The black boxes simply allow us to show how good we are. You don't buy a book because it was written on a Mac vs a PC, you don't enjoy a piece of music just because it was played on a Steinway. Artists' and house painters both use paint, but it's what they can do with the brush that makes a piece of art cost more than having a whole house painted.

Craftmanship and delivering on a promise is what you sell. Everything else is just the tools to work with.

If today's light switch sells for half as much as yesterdays, now you can either sell twice as many on the same number of jobs or you can sell the same number of switches on twice as many jobs. At least there are more light switches in a house then there are plasmas :)

Rob,

I agree to an extent. When you are talking whole house control, the average homeowner is just not capable of designing and installing a reliable and workable system.

Lighting control is a whole different game. Unless you lived in a cave, everyone has experienced lighting control at the most basic level, the switch. It is not much of a jump to have a lightor multiple lights controlled by a keypad button.

I think an above-average technically competent homeowner can install a very workable lighting system. I am not talking a 25,000' house, but a 4,000-8,000' house with less than 100 loads.

I installed my own Homeworks Wireless system and am quite happy with it. I don't know that I could have gotten the system to integrate with our lives better had I had a CI program it. If something is not working right for us, I can change it very easily. And I think I have created a few fairly sophisticated conditionals and sequences if I do say so myself.

I guess my point is there is much less room for a CI to distinguish themselves in the lighting control arena that there is in whole home control. And with the move toward "greener" homes, lighting control is just scrathing the surface of what it could become.

For the record, I did buy the hardware off a CI.

Bubby consider yourself not the ordinary home owner just because you are on this forum. Most homeowners would like to save monay, but not to the extent to put their own lighting control system in a 4,000' house.

I agree with Rahim here Bubby.. You are not the average home owner. The moment you landed at remote central and created an account you left your amateur status and became a DIY. As a DIY you are not a CI's typical client and in most cases you don't require a CI's services. You have an understanding of the products in your home and you have formed opinions about how you want them to operate. You are your own CI.

A CI's typical client is hiring a pro because they have no idea where to begin and they don't want to be bothered with the details. We make it work the way we feel it should and they may or may not have some suggestions at the end once they begin to use it.

I asked some at the Lutron booth how they expected to differentiate Homeworks from Radio Ra2 since most systems are not composed of more than 200 loads. I never received a good answer. The problem is, what idiot would design a decentralized 100 load system, other than a salon who could sell but not manage anything else?

For the time being it will be a restricted line; even Homeworks dealers will have to become certified, something I'd wager is a mere technicality.

Programming a lighting system is hardly what I'd call programming. It's somewhere between configuration--how alarm panels are programmed --and GUI code, say Systembuilder. Where the rubber meets the road is when you have a problem, fixing an issue with a link, fixing strange load issues and that sort. Programming a Homeworks system is hardly difficult. I suspect I could train my 13 year old daughter to do it in about 30 minutes. Lutron intentionally makes programming so simple even AV techs can program it.

How can you distinguish your Homeworks programming? Conditionals? Automatic Sequences? Sure, a great design would be to build a conditional on day and night and have every button programmed to recall different lighting scenes based upon day or night. Then you should build a timer into every button so that the load attached to that button automatically dims down based upon a occupency sensor. Or install a light sensor and based upon intensity recall different scenes.

Alan

Not yet.

Well, nothing is "yet"

They were showing one of their Tstats (LED display only) with RR2. Apparently an LCD version will be avail. for both. The only tstats with displays at CEDIA were third parties via RS-232/IP for HW.

Am I missing something, Sound?

Hopefully no one. But RadioRA is meant for retrofits. There is no way, even if price were no object, that I could have convinced the wife we needed to rip out huge chunks of drywall and spend a few weeks with construction going on to have a centralized system. So given there are many more existing homes than new construction, the retrofit market could be huge.

And after living with my system for a couple of years, I am not sure I would want to go full centralized if I were building a new house. More so than I am now, but for things like bedrooms etc, I think I would want Maestro's. For example, in our Master Bedroom, the first dimmer is a Maestro. It is programmed to the main MBR scene with intensity levels based on time of day with respect to sunrise/sunset. My wife did not want to have to try and hit a keypad button coming into the bedroom. It also serves as the All Off for the MBR. Just hit the Maestro on the way out and all the lights go off. (If any load in the MBR is On, the Maestro is at 1% so pressing it again, executes the OFF command. There is a keypad by the door and it is used for other scenes, but mainly it is the Maestro.


I though they made it simple for Sparky. LOL

Its true, even i am allowed to configure Lutron systems :).

yes. These are two different issues. You can put third party TSTATs on to Radio Ra2 and next Gen Homeworks via third party Z-wave ( I think ) interface. The point is that you can put non-Lutron stats on to their system. They also showed that they can parse language as well as Bill Clinton. They will have a touch panel only it's called a "dynamic keypad." These stats can have information displayed on the "dynamic keypad."

The Wireless TSTAT from Lutron is 6-12 months out.

Julie hinted that RR2 and HW QS are incompatible, despite both being 'Clear Connect' technology.

Confirmation?

When I asked the project manager if there were T-STATS available he cautiously stated they would not be available at release. They were on the "coming soon" wall along with the Dynamic keypad and ambient light sensor.

I sell a lot of RTI so "coming soon" to me means it doesn't exist. The rest of Radio RA 2 stuff seems prepped for shipment.

im sure that lutron does not want ra2 to overtake homeworks sales.
they must have a gameplan that consists of making a newer version of homeworks that is much more impressive then the current RA2.

the base system will be RA2 and the luxury system will be the NEW homeworks system . .

thats my guess.

Absolutely true. They COULd communicate with each other, but it's by design to keep them separate. Only things they really can't share are the lighting devices, but shades, sensors, tstats, etc. are all shared.