I have been keen on using my iPhone as a remote for years now but currently have a harmony 890 pro that gives me an all in one solution for my lights and multiple room av setup.
The sq blaster look promising but my situation seems to present 1 problem. All 3 of my tvs are in seperate rooms as my cable boxes, ps3, ht receiver etc… Currently my harmonys use ir to control the tvs and rf to ir blaster to control my other components inside a cabinet. If I’m using the sq blaster it would be in the cabinet with my components, how would I turn my tvs on and off? It seems I would need an additional remote to send the ir signal, which would be a step backwards from my current 1 remote setup.
The newly announced SQBlaster Plus which we were showing at CES is designed for both in cabinet and in room blasting.
It has 8 builtin blasters that give 270degree coverage. It can be easily wall or ceiling mounted or it looks quite good on a table under the TV.
In addition it has four addressable IR ‘ports’ that can be used with IR emitters (they stick on equipment) or blasters (small LED’s that can be placed underneath or next to equipment.
Because it is a WiFi to IR solution, you can install multiple devices and the software will route the command to the correct blaster, and then to the correct set of IR channel.
The Plus works with the existing Mios plugin and SQRemote HD so you can have one interface to both lights and AV components.
We will be offering a ‘bundle’ price if you want to do an install like the one you are suggesting.
We are in final stages of FCC testing and expect to start shipping within the next few weeks.
How far are your tvs from the cabinets? You can run an external ir cable from the blaster to where your tvs are located. As for the separate rooms, you would need separate blasters if the rooms are far from each other. Or use some sort of IR extender.
[quote=“PhilTMan, post:7, topic:170217”]What is the maximum distance for the IR emitter?
Ths[/quote]
We don’t have a specified maximum, although I know SQJohn installed a Gen 1 Blaster that had at least 30 feet of extension and it worked fine. The new gen 2 blasters switch 5V through a 12 ohm or 36 ohm resistor (internal jumper can be removed to increase the resistance) at the approriate carrier signal which is typically 36kHz to 40kHz or around 60kHz fro certain cable boxes. We support higher frequencies as well for some very odd pieces of equipment out there.
The remote ‘emitters’ are either standard red leds that stick on the face (they emit enough IR to drive equipment at that range without interfering with nearby devices, or we also have high current ‘blasters’ that are IR LEDS matched to the correct wavelength that can blast a cabinet.
Given that information, I would say some of the electronic engineers out on the board could probable work out what the maximum length is. I am assuming that the cable type would matter greatly.
I’m currently running all of my TV’s in the house back to my equipment room and therefore need to run IR solutions. You can use cat5 cabling to create these runs and some of them are well over 100ft and they work just fine.
and send IR commands from Cabinet back to each TV location to control On/Off and Volume. I had mine set up like this for a while, but ended up deciding that Harmony 890 Pro was better solution for me.
