I can not provide anything specific to B&K, however, when controlling a larger distributed system there are a couple of things I do to make my systems more flexible, stable, predictable, transferrable and easier to troubleshoot. If done correctly, you will be able to use processor and remote layouts over and over again with little modification.
Before I do anything else, I set up the processor in a very organized manner.
I use what I call "root level" programming where I create many small single command macros and then call those macros in larger activity macros.
Obviously these steps may be approached differently for different equipment so take this all with a grain of salt...
For example, I will create individual single command macros for zone power on, power off, mute on, mute off, and all of the available source input commands. In these single command macros I will also set or clear a status flag to indicate the power, mute or input state. I need to mention at this time that I will have already named flags on the processor for these states. I will have also created a macro for each zone that clears all input source flags. This macro will be called in every single command input source macro before I issue the command and set a flag for a particular source. Here is what this may look like...
Zone1 Source1 selection macro:
System Macro, Zone1 clear all input flags 232 command, (select source1 on zone1) Set Flag, Zone1 Source1
When I finish all of my single command zone macros I then build my activity macros by calling (or nesting) the single zone "system macros" that I require for a given activity. This often will include single command system macros for TV on, DVD on, zone on, zone input, TV input etc... and any required delays. Here is what an activity macro may look like...
Zone1 Source1 Activity macro:
System Macro, TV On System Macro, DVD On System Macro, Zone1 On System Macro, Zone1 Source1 delay 4.0 seconds System Macro, TV Video4 System Macro, DVD Play
The advantages to this will be that...
**You will only have to enter each 232 or IR command once (this is a great help when using 232 because there is no search and replace for 232). **If you build for all of your zone possibilities eventhough you are not using them all, you can easily "grab" the commands you will need for activity macros on new or expanded jobs without having to create them command by command. **You can easily copy and paste more complex macros and only change/edit some of the steps... for example, if you create an activity macro for watching source 1 in zone 1, you can copy the macro into the source 2 zone 1 activity macro and then just swap out the source single command macro that you have already created. **If you set or clear flags along with the individual single command macros, they are automatically imbedded in the larger activity macros and you will only have to look in one place to see if the flag status has been set correctly. **If the flags have been set at the root level, they will be there for future use even if you do not see a use for them now and it can be a real pain to go back and start setting, clearing and testing flags once all of this is done. **When you have nested macros within another macro, the processor will run them in sequential order so the only delays you will need to worry about are the power cycle delays associated with your various components.
Regarding the flags... I will often use flags for the following scenarios:
I can test the power status of a zone before a command or macro is called to determine if I should set the initial startup volume or not.
I can test the power status of a zone to see if I need to issue a power cycle delay between zone power and input selection (useful with multi-zone AV receivers).
On a recent job I had 1 video zone and 2 audio zones adjacent to eachother in an open area. We wanted individual volume control for each zone and a way to simply add one or both of the audio zones when watching certain programs. I created one page accessed with the right arrow hard button from any of the video source control pages that had On, Off, Mute, and volume commands for the two audio zones (the video zone volume remained on the hard buttons). When an On button was pressed, I tested for each video zone source flag, issued the proper macro for turning on the audio zone to the same current source in the video zone depending on which flag was "true" and then issued a stop running macro command. This was very easy to do after the fact because I had imbedded the flags already.
I can move this one "off the air" if you want to discuss any of it in detail.
