On February 4, 2010 at 19:40, 39 Cent Stamp said...
IR can be made to be 99% reliable with the right control system and a good integrator. The way this is done is by using a control system that does not require line of site from the remote to the device (TV/Blu-ray). What i mean is that your remote or touchpanel uses RF or wi-fi to communicate with a control processor or base station. The IR commands are sent from/thru the base station via IR emitters that are attached to the TV or Blu-ray player or whatever.
What this does is it gives you a very reliable wireless connection via RF or WI-FI between your remote or touch screen and a very reliable wired connection between the processor or base station and the TV or Blu-ray player or whatever. Now it doesnt matter what room you are in or where you point the remote. Your commands will be sent to your devices.
You mentioned your pronto. Are you using IR directly out of the pronto? Or are you using an extender?
I am using both depending on the device. I do tend to have more issues when going through the RF extender (not surprisingly I guess, as it simply makes things more complex).
If you are using an extender and still having issues with missed IR commands then my advice would be to look at your macros and make sure that you have your delays between commands adjusted. As an example. TV ON and TV INPUT2 would need a long enough delay between them so that the TV can actually turn on and accept the INPUT command.
A macro would look like this...
TV ON
Delay 5 seconds
TV INPUT 2
To give you an idea of how different delay times can be for different TV's i have a 14 second delay at one clients house for her 19" samsung LCD's. Most TV's will take an input command after 5 seconds. So this sort of thing needs to be tweaked on site.
Thanks I am aware of this, and I have done all the tweaking I could. However the required delay is not always the same for the same device and the same commands. So I guess the issue is not just about delay, but rather errors in transmission, although I am not sure.
Several times when I had the issues I tried adding a 5 second delay (when 0.5 is normally enough) and it does not change the issue.
Another thing to look at is to make sure that the IR ports are routed. A. to the TV B. to the Blu-ray player etc. And (if possible/available) shut off the IR blaster.
Not sure what you mean regarding routing.
I have blacked out the IR blaster as it was in a closet, and obviously was creating some issues.
