guessed
Master Member
Posts: 4412
Karma: +25/-0
[applaud] [smite]
Vera 3, UI-Broken#5
Re: Global Cache GC-100-06
? Reply #4 on: May 20, 2010, 10:24:00 am ?
Quote
If you have an RS-232 attachable device, you still need a Luup Plugin to send that device it’s specific control commands, and to “map” them to the Media Control services that Vera exposes.
Vera exposes a number of these Media Control services, to let folks map Remote-Control style commands, like “Volume Up” to the byte/character sequence that needs to be Sent when that’s requested (either an IR proto-code, a RS232 Byte sequence etc)
eg. My TV needs “PON” to be sent to it, over RS-232, in order to turn it on, but my Amp needs something much more complex.
If you’re looking for examples, I have Plugins things that do this for my Panasonic TV, and for my Onkyo Receiver:
http://code.mios.com/trac/mios_panasonic-tv
http://code.mios.com/trac/mios_onkyo-media-control
and I use these directly from SQRemote, where they show up like an “IR” device (even though they’re not using IR). I use both plugins above daily via SQRemote, and have used Vera’s IR Catalog to drive another device in my AV Stack.
If it’s IR, then Vera has a limited built-in catalog of the IR codes needed, but for RS232 there is no catalog and the Plugin must be hand-built. To do this, you’ll need the [RS232] Protocol documentation from your AV Component vendor… and a starting point/template like the examples above on http://code.mios.com
Technically Vera’s “(Advanced)” Scenes could be used to build a Macro equivalent, and SQBlaster can execute Vera Scenes via a Button press… it’s a bit around-the-houses at the moment, but it can be done.
That said, (Advanced) Scenes are a little broken in Vera… something I believe they’ll be addressing in UI4.
For Macro’s in SQRemote, you might want to post that on the SQRemote discussion board. There’s a public reference to it in this thread, and the Tool is being actively developed with new features:
http://www.squareconnect.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4&p=53&hilit=macro#p53
but more voices are always a good thing, and they’re very responsive to feedback.