Interesting comments. Good to see there is still some some activity here. I thought I would drop in to see what was still going on in the Pronto forum.
I originally went for Pronto a few years ago because of the reasons mentioned above - the community was much more welcoming and accepting to the techie enthusiast who is happy to contribute their own experience and resources but has no intention of ever using a third party professional installer. Help from a number of the people on this forum was instrumental in getting me to where I was (particularly Lyndel & Barry). The most useful thing was the huge archive of great information and advice – almost anything I tried I found someone had done something similar before. I was disappointed when Pronto went down (RIP) as I'm in the process of building a new house and I had already created a lot of the security monitoring, entertainment, media, lighting/C-Bus control, and other toys to work with Prontos, when I had to find something new to start again.
I've recently been re-invigorated by some of the alternative systems I have been looking into. Although it's taken a few paradigm shifts in approach, I've pretty much managed to replicate everything I was planning to do with Prontos on a couple of other platforms which seem similarly welcoming and don't try to enforce "professional installer/distributor only" lockout policies. In addition, the different approaches to control application building have opened a number of other interesting avenues and ideas for me.
With the portable device evolution happening currently, I gave up on ever finding another accessible and fully programmable smart remote alternative (with screen + hard buttons) that was not artificially restricted or stupidly overpriced. However if you’re happy to try things like Globalcache gateways combined with other user interface devices (tablet/PC/iWhatever/Android), you can do some pretty cool stuff now.
If you want to use Windows PC or tablet, Stardraw Control 2010 is a bit pricey to get a licence (although you can have a play with a working time limited trial version), but once you get your head around the approach, it is also very powerful. You’re back end coding needs to be in C# rather than Javascript/Prontoscript, (nothing a few hours Googling won’t help you get around). If you create a “driver” for 2 way control, you can expose it to the graphic programming interface and use it that way from then on. Interestingly, if you do pay for a licence, the company will undertake to build a 2-way driver for any device you request if you can provide the documentation. And you can use your existing Pronto CCF/Hex codes for IR programming. Then you can create either stand alone applications in windows, or client-server set-ups at compilation time. The forum and company help are very helpful too. Although the reference material is OK, probably the only drawback is that there is so much capability which is not fully documented (maybe it’s obvious to someone who had grown up using C#, but I kept having “I didn’t know you could do that!” moments). There’s some good teaching videos too.
Alternatively, I also recently started trying CommandFusion which is also very powerful, but another mindwarp to get into the underlying paradigms if you’re coming from Pronto land. Although initially created for iPhone clients, there is now an iPad client, with current development for GUI clients for Android, Windows and Web browser based control. Although there was already ability for 2-way control, the most recent release includes full Javascript support as well, giving much more flexibility, and allowing me to port most of my existing Prontoscripts. I was forced to learn about RegEx for parsing feedback, but in retrospect I am now grateful I did. Again, there’s a lot of powerful features and methods which are barely documented, but simply emailing for help gets pretty comprehensive answers fast, and an enthusiastic helpful community is already growing for it. Got to re-learn or convert you CCF/Hex codes to Globalcache, but I hear they are negotiating with IR database providers. A recent e-mail chat with one of the people there revealed they are about to release a range of back end hardware devices as well. They’re Australian too! (Not sure if it’s just my perception, but seems us Aussies are over-represented in these areas – maybe because we have different automation products to most of the world, and overpriced low volume tech is even more overpriced by the time it gets sold here!).
I was also planning to look into OpenRemote again, but I just have not had the time. A quick look at the forums shows they are also pretty proactive and helpful also.
I still think it would be great if either some Chinese/Taiwanese company found a way to licence and build cheap Pronto clones, or if the firmware could be ported into software host/emulator (for iPads, Windows, Android, etc – which should be easy given the Simulator could already do most of it anyway), so that everything that has been created for Pronto by both professionals and hobbyists was not going to waste.
I’ve got no business interest in these areas, and am never likely to have one. Just thought I’d share the experiences as a fellow Pronto Hobbyist Geek who was despondent at the death of Pronto, but have since found new exciting alternatives that allow me to re-use at least some of the effort/coding/knowledge I had put into my own Pronto set-ups.
