Day 1 - Control4 Dealer Training

If anyone is wondering what Control4 is doing with its $30+ million, I can tell you they aren't wasting it on extravagant offices and idle personnel. Control4 employees are jammed into small cubicles piled high with circuit boards and story boards, hustling to ship the next product, finish another driver, and prepare a new booth for EHX.

The company picked up much of its quality-assurance equipment on the cheap from a defunct business. My favorite machine is the one that tortures finished product -- bouncing it up and down and subjecting it to very uncomfortable temperatures.

Products that can't stand the heat, go back to the drawing board.

Then there's the giant RF chamber, used for testing Control4's wireless gear to ensure RF emissions will past FCC muster. Control4 has worked hard to ensure that its Zigbee RF light switches are robust. It can be difficult to get RF to work when the radio is buried in a junction box surrounded by metal and circuitry. Control4's patent-pending solution is a very flat board that is thin enough to reside outside of the junction box, within the dimmer's paddle. A slot in the board accommodates the air-gap -- the required switch that allows users to completely disable a dimmer.

The board is thin enough so that Control4's RF dimmers maintain a profile comparable to traditional dimmers.

Where much of Control4's money seems to be going is training. The impressive training facility seats about 30 dealers, with individual workstations simulating a house with a fireplace, sprinklers, a doorbell, front doors, two audio zones, televisions and a few rooms of lighting. Each station includes a rack of A/V gear and Control4 controllers.

There are only 12 dealers in my session (what with everyone still lost in the CEDIA fog). Some 400 dealers have participated in the 2 1/2-day training session. I'm the third woman.

But I smoked the boys when it came to programming.

More of that later...

- Julie Jacobson, CE Pro editor-at-large

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Day 2 - Control4 Dealer Training

Day 3 - Control4 Dealer Training