Better History controls in Control4

In the latest Control4 update (3.2.0), an option has been added to the Control4 app called “History”, where you can easily see all events that happened around your environment. This is great but a little noisy.

It shows “movement” events in a weird way, putting “opened” and “closed” at the end of it, e.g.:

  • Entry Movement open
  • Entry Movement closed

This shows that the movement started and ended, which is fine.Image preview
Figure: Bad Example – Opened and Closed is not the best wording for movement

It is not a natural way to read quick movements. For example there is a difference between a car that quickly passes by and one that parks. Say you had a camera facing a busy street, do you want 2 events (open and closed) for every car that passed by?

The same argument works for people that walk past a sensor. This creates visual noise.

2 improvements for the UI would be:

  1. Change the wording – instead of “Entry movement open” and “Entry movement closed” use “Movement started” and “Movement ended”
  2. Single status message – Have a record for “Brief movement” instead of “started” and “ended” for the quick movements
  3. 2 status messages – For activities where someone was in the room for say 10 minutes, you could change “Entry Movement ended” to”Movement ended (10 minutes)”