On October 4, 2009 at 16:14, GerryA51 said...
I wouldnt consider prodigy open architecture. I was refering to crestron in general, and the need to continually tweak things, even on products that have been out for years.
Now that being said, prodigy is integrated into the crestron master control suite. You need toolbox to do resets and firmware. You need simpl to do graphics editing. Open or not, the minute you start tying these programs together, there is going to be some tweaking and work arounds involved.
But please, by all means chime in with your prodigy programming experience.
Your not going to have much luck using simpl to edit your graphics :).
Every piece of crestron hardware i have unboxed in the last 5 years has a slip of paper in it that says "go update the firmware". Thats the first thing you do for hardware and the second is set Net ID's IMO so you dont have 2 keypads canceling each other out with both being set to the default ID. Once your firmware/software and Net ID's are set you should be good to go and any problems that show up should be reported to True Blue. Especially since prodigy is autogenerated programming that a dealer could not have botched on their own.
As far as software updates go.. master installer is relatively new. In the past you would download simpl and find a note to go download a new database and when you went to download the new database you found a note that said to go download the latest vtpro where you would find another note about downloading viewport or toolbox and basically spent a whole day locatiogn, downloading and installing all your software. Firmware was just as bad and now its all automated. Thank god for master installer!
Software and firmware updates go hand in hand with electronics. I am on version 9.0.1.8 of itunes and version 3.1 of iphone firmware. Point being that there is no way around it. I guess its possible that prodigy does not ship with the bright orange "go update the firmware" note but it would be sort of silly for them to not include it especially when they are signing new dealers with prodigy.
I did not and will not be ordering the dealer kit so i cant comment on the computer they shipped or what it contains. I dont have hardware yet because we are focusing on Digital Media right now so i cant comment on program loading or devices not being seen.
If this buggy behavior is still present after updating software and firmware and making sure you have your communication settings correct (ip's. net id's etc) i would then look towards wiring & power. If your wired properly and your power requirements are covered then its time to get Crestron involved.
Its common for Crestron and everyone else to release 'unfinished' products but Crestron typically "finishes" them ASAP. The only 2 Crestron products i havent been 100% happy with were the TPMC-10 and the AAS. I was able to tame them both but IMO they are not Crestron quality products and the fact that they have discontinued both leads me to believe they feel the same way. Both were re-badged products and both took much longer to configure than they should have IMO. I kept having Phast flashbacks while dealing with them. Meaning that it felt like i had to trick it into working the way it was supposed to.
