I am a computer programmer, so programming the MX-900 is no great chore.

The problem I am having is decidng exactly what to do. This is where the experience of a proper installer would come in handy (and of course the members of this forum!).

My general idea, after reading many posts in this forum, is to setup the main Watch and Listen pages with the main activities.

ie Watch
HDTV
Cable
DVD
Media Player

Listen
CD
FM
AM
Media Player

When I hit HDTV (for example), it
- turns on all required power
- switch TV inputs appropriately
- show extra TV operations on LCD buttons
- program all hard buttons as required
- add Power On/Off to LCD buttons (in case system stuffs up)
- add LCD buttons to jump to other device pages (ie amplifier)
- set Punch Through buttons for volume and power

and repeat for each device.

Is this overall concept a good one? Is there something I could be doing better or a bit smarter?

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I have setup most of the units in the MX-900 at least 3 or 4 times, and each time takes a fair bit of effort.

One problem is that none of my devices are in the IR database. The LG HDTV is close, but not close enough. So I have to 'learn' every sinlge key on every device. Painful. At least the MX-900 editor software is fairly good in this regard.

My initial annoyance is with the button editor. I setup a device with all the pages I think it needs, and add all the buttons I can think off. What happens then is that I find I need to add new buttons to the first page (ie buttons for other devices, for example). I find that I cannot simply move the buttons around - no - I generally have to redo all the pages again. This is where experience would help, of course.

Does anyone know of a good trick to make the button editor more user friendly?

While none of my devices are in the IR database, the editor seems to want to link to some random device. For example, my 'Cable' device thinks it is an Audio device of type AUX1 (or something like that). I can see no way of clearing this erroneous allocation, except by deleting the device. The problem here is that when I add a button (say 'Mode'), the editor automatically sets that button to the nearest command it can find for AUX1 - ie AUX1.Mode. Which of course is totally incorrect.

Can I setup a custom device that is not linked to anything in the IR Database?

I read the review for the MX-950 in this forum a bit more closely - and hit gold! You can actually drag these buttons around! Good stuff - that will save me a lot of time.

You found what you needed that makes a world of difference! Right on!

Hi,

Well the first thing I do is create hidden devices where the actual IR commands are stored. If the desired device is in the database I just go with the buttons that it creates.

Then I create the "activity" devices such as you described. These buttons are all macros invoking the hidden device buttons, as well as delays, etc.

I don't put jumps to other devices, I have just the buttons that are useful for each activity. The upside is that the user doesn't have know what device to jump to for a specific operation and doesn't have to remember to "jump back". The downside is some duplication. For example I might have a "Closed Caption" button. When watching TV this would control the set-top-box, when watching a DVD the player.

Thank you! This solved my problems - this is exactly what I have done and it seems to work just fine. It is a lot of work, of course.

It strikes me as annoying that this sort of information is not in the manual. It would have saved me two or three days of frustration.

I am well on my way to getting this thing 'programmed'. I really miss not having variables, I have to say. I updated to the Live Update version of the software yesterday, hoping it might have some of my equipment in the IR database. No such luck. There also seems to be a fair number of annoying program bugs in this version - or perhaps I did not notice them before?

Apart from that, the MX-900 is not a bad piece of equipment.

Really, I'm interested in hearing what kind of bugs?

Thanks

Well, I do not have the program running in front of me, so I am working from memory.

1. you cannot delete button links (ie IR, Learned or Macros). There is a function to do this - it simply does not do anything at all.
2. In simulate mode, the small indicator icons on the keys are very flakey. ie the ones that show if a key is linked to a macro, Learn, etc. Often they are missing completely. This is quite disconcerting when you are programming key arfter key - you think you have missed some! If you change pages and come back, they all appear ok - so it is just a visual thing.
3. The button link screen does not always show its contents - especialy for Learned keys. So you do not know if a button has contents in it or not - ie whould you relearn that key or not? You cannot tell.

If I had the program in front of me, I could go on and on. But to what effect? Unless I can report these bugs to someone that can fix them, it is rather pointless and a waste of my time. I am a programmer, and I do this sort of thing all day long, so perhaps I am a bit pickier than most users - or simply notice a bit more.

1. Highlighting a button and hitting the Delete button on your keyboard gives you the options to delete buttons, learned codes, macros etc.

2. Haven't seen that before. I'll see if I can recreate that on mine.

3. Don't know what you mean by "button link screen", but hovering over any button shows it's contents, as well as the indicator icons mentioned in your previous question.

If you haven't already done so, you might try reinstalling the software.

Mike
www.SurfRemoteControl.com

I just got my MX-900. I'm coming from the old Pronto's and I'm looking forward to getting this thing working. For my Pronto, I did the hidden pages then activity based stuff and it seemed to work. I'd be curious to see how you are doing this. Would you mind sharing your file? You could post it or email it to me. I just want to see how you are going about this and see if it will work for me.

Thanks!!

Look under the files section of this site. You'll see a lot of user-submitted configs to give you a lot of ideas.

Ok, I looked around, found some examples and I have made good progress thanks to all the info that is here.

I do have a question: How do you handle something like a volume button that you can click once or twice to bump the volume or hold it down and it just goes until you release the button? My receiver remote works like this but I haven't quite figure it out for the MX-900 yet. It seems you would have a normal and a press-hold for the volume buttons, but what codes would go in the press-hold part? How do you make it repeat until you let go of the button?

If the codes are from the database they'll work just fine. You don't need press-and-holds or anything. It's a repeating code and will work fine as is.

If it's a learned code you may need to try different methods of learning...check the "Tips and Tricks" under the Features section of this site.

What's the manufacturer of the receiver? In some cases you may need to learn the ramping of Volume (and channel) with the 2-time learn feature in the software.