Pronto or Girder 'buffer'?

[siberian]

Love my Pronto so far but I had a question that I can't find answered anywhere.

Does the Pronto hardware or Girder software have any sort of storage buffer? Here is what I am doing.

1) Page with a nice little map of my house
2) User picks what room they are in
3) User gets a page with all devices in that room to control
4) Here the user can select what inputs they want switched to this room.

Thats the easy part, it gets more complex now that I have to allow them access to the switching system since the switch requires commands be given INPUT to OUTPUT.

Essentially I have reversed the process to 'Select your output location and now pick an input'.

So, what I'd like to do is place my 'room' in a buffer on the pronto (or send Girder an IR command to set a buffer) and then when the user selects an output have girder or pronto compose the new command.

Sounds a lot more complex then it is

John-

[Andrew Pratt]

No you can't do that on the pronto...you'll have to emulate it somehow with the way you walk people through the macro's. I don't fully understand what it is you're trying to do but there has to be a way to step people through it with different panels on the pronto

[Eiffel]

Girder should be able to do what you're looking for:

For instance, when you select a new room, you could send a specific IR code which girder will catch, and use to enable/disable some groupings of commands.

With a pronto, you may also be able to send multiple commands and achieve similar functionality for most keys (It wont work with 'repeat' keys though). For instance when you push the 'CD' button on your pronto you could send the following IR signals:
- Select CD input on sony receiver (for Fam. room and BR1)
- Select CD input on Rotel preamp (for Living room)
- Select CD function on Bose alarmclock (just kidding)

Eiffel

[siberian]

I may actually try to use LUA and Girder to handle this.

Fundamentally the issue here is that I am controlling a serial device, not an IR device.

The serial device command goes in the order of

INPUT
OUTPUT
TAKE CHANGE

Where an input is an input source and an output is a specific output location in the house. So input 1 may be tivo and output 4 is my office. I would say

C (hange)
I (nput)
1 (tivo)
O (utput)
4 (office)
T (Take the change)

That would switch tivo to my office tv. etc etc etc

So, here we see that the command structure requires you to define an input and then an output.

Thats fine but my issue is that each room has its own equipment. So my office has a Sharp LCD TV and an old kenwood receiver. My living room has a Sony TV and no receiver and the tivo IR is distributed everywhere via homerun to my panel in the garage.

Result:Each room has its own set of remotes. Bogus! So my thinking is that if I can 'tell' the pronto what room I am in I can have a set of screens for each room that is only relevant to the IR that room. When I am in my office 'volume up' will send the sharp LCD volume up. When I am in the living room it sends the 'Sony' volume up. Then we just carry the pronto around.

Thats when the 'pick your room first' comes into play.

Pick your room
Pick your source
Pronto presents relevant screens for that room after issuing the 'switch' command via Girder.

Problem: serial string requires input before output requiring a buffer of some sort.

I'll poke at LUA this weekend and see what I can get.

Thanks folks, definently toss more opinions and ideas out if you have any.
John

No you can't do that on the pronto...you'll have to emulate it somehow with the way you walk people through the macro's. I don't fully understand what it is you're trying to do but there has to be a way to step people through it with different panels on the pronto

[siberian]

Got it!

No need for LUA.

What I am doing is setting is giving each input device and output location its own IR code.

Then I treat [treg1] as the INPUT device and [treg2] as the OUTPUT device.

Then, when Girder recieves the code for the input device it sets [treg1] to a predefined number. Same for the output device.

When the actual switch is requested(another IR command) Girder, using the Serial.dll plugin for generic serial support, sends 'XCI[treg1]O[treg2]T' to the serial port.

Voila! IR based matrix switching via Girder.

Awesome, thanks for your pointers Andrew, I'd have never jumped on the pronto without them. In fact, I already sold all my Crestron gear on ebay

John-