Hey Community,
First I want to say thank you to Tom and your staff. You and the hardworking people that help you produce your youtube content have been so damn instrumental in helping me learn about and choose large part of the software, hardware I use today. I would like to to see if I can get some feedback surrounding home control systems and best practices. It seems the AV (audio video) industry has almost completely adopted every aspect of today standards from the IT and networking industry. The advent of HDMI over ethernet, bluethooth, wireless speakers, AV receivers, garage doors openers , security cameras and now our appliances are starting to come on line. Almost every piece of electronic equipment in our homes has an ip address. I don’t know if anyone has been to CEDIA, but it is a huge community, essentially the world of IOT devices and aside from CES it is one of my favorite conventions. Meanwhile IOT devices tend to be the weakest link as far a security is concerned and a more common place it seems in the residential market rather than business market. As the lines between AV and IT continue to blur It would be great to see some automation and control system discussion going on within some IT concentric forums.
Sorry for the diatribe… on to my questions.
I am just getting started in the AV industry I have chosen to use control4 as my control system. Now… they get their panties all in a bunch went you start talking about vlans and network segregation, it seems as though they just don’t want to support that networking methodology. Control4 purchased Pakedge a networking device company some years back (smart) in an attempt to have a complete ecosystem. Control4 lighting and Control systems, Pakedge (networking) and Triad (high end AV speakers equipment) They of course work really well together but the networking price points are just not realistic for a large percentage of my customers… I really like ubiquity’s AP and switches and I love PFSence, plus the price points are more reasonable … In my use case damn near every device on the network is IOT. I would really like to VLAN the IOT networks, have a guest network and LAN network for any PC’s, Switches the router. The problem I face is with Control4, It doesn’t play well with the IOT devices if its on the lan side of the network and if I am going to VLAN a network it seems kinda silly to put the device that is controlling the home on an insecure vlan segment… Does anyone work with control4 or any other home control system that would have any advice? Or is it silly to even worry about insecure devices on residential projects? This is my first post so go easy on me, haha…