On April 5, 2019 at 12:56, Richie Rich said...
I know this has come up a zillion times over the years (lack of discretes on cable boxes) but I have an interesting one here.
Combination of a vacation home, profoundly technophobic client and money, lots and lots of money.
Despite being fully capable of pressing the "power" button on the locally placed cable boxes, he doesn't want to have to do that.
House sits unused for months at a time and despite insistence that someone on his staff email me ahead of time prior to his visits they seldom do, resulting in everybody's favorite "nothing works, come fix it" phone calls at odd hours.
There is a Crestron system in place, sleep mode on the cable boxes is off. But sometimes the boxes just resort to an off state after updates and get out of sequence and/or get stuck on stupid, especially after sitting dormant for months.
Back in the day we used to just use video sync sensors to determine if the box was on/off but I doubt that is an option anymore.
Is there anything that can be put together to reliably track the status of his boxes and issue a power command as needed?
The boxes have no shortcuts or quasi discretes (numeric power, etc). Directv is not an option (my usual go to for people like this).
Open to suggestions. Budget is not an issue.
Add a power button for the cable box- if the TV shows 'No Input Signal, have them use the button.
I called Scientific Atlanta years ago, to find out if this function was possible and was told that they design the boxes to use it, but the cable providers omit that, as well as the IR input.
Aside from using a voltage sensor from an analog video out jack, there's no good way to do this unless you want to program the Crestron to send a Power On command at 5AM, or whenever they would never be awake.
