Introduction
The Rē offers nearly unlimited options to automate your Activity Remotes with macros. In this paper, I’ll review some of the different ways that you might want to setup your Activities to power devices on and off and switch inputs to the correct video source. I’ll use a typical setup with a TV, Cable Box and DVD player and two activities, Watch TV and Watch DVD.
Preparation
After setting up each device and before I setup activities I test each device remote to verify the On/Off, Pwr On, Pwr Off, and input switch buttons. Some devices support the discrete Pwr On and Pwr Off, and some do not. If any of the power buttons don’t function as expected, I delete them so they will not be used in the Start and All Off macro in activities I later setup. I also identify and note the correct I/O switching buttons that I will need in my activity macros. Generally I’ll verify all of the buttons in the device remotes to verify that I have the best IR Code selected, and delete extra buttons and learn any missing buttons from the original remote before creating activities.
Default Activity
When you set up an activity, the Start and All Off macro are created for you. The software puts the Pwr On button in the macro for each device selected to be a part of the activity. If the device doesn’t have a Pwr On button, the On/Off toggle is used. Similarly, the All Off macro uses the Pwr Off or On/Off buttons. The remaining button groups are created from your selections by device. See the online User’s Manual for more general details on setting up activities.
Often, I will include all of the devices in each activity even though they are not used so I can control the power for all devices in the All Off macro. I didn’t do that in this example.
Standard Start Macro
The most common way to add input switching to an activity is to add the input select button to the Start macro as shown at the right. In many cases you will need to add a delay after the power on steps to allow the TV to warm
up so it will see the IR signal to switch to the Cable input.
Alternative Switching Method
In the previous method, you may find that it is inconvenient to hold the remote pointing at the TV for 15 seconds waiting for the warm up delay. Since the Rē allows any number of macros in an activity remote, you may want to make a 2nd macro button instead of adding delays and switching to the Start macro. You press the Cable button to switch the TV to the Cable input after the TV warms up as shown in the Watch TV activity below. This example uses a one button macro, but if you have more switching to do, you can include that in the new macro as well. You can do this in the Watch DVD activity remote as well.
Activity Control as an Activity
Another possibility for setting up power and input switching is to create an activity remote that exclusively handles power and input switching for all of your activities. This gives you a single control panel that is easy to access to start any activity. Another benefit is that it allows you to remove all of the power buttons from the activity remote screens so you don’t accidentally tap a button that turns of the power in the middle of a movie or TV show. You can do this for any number of Activity Remotes.
In this example, I can elect to power all the devices on with the All On macro or power on/off individual devices. All Off powers down everything at once. The DVD and TV buttons switch the inputs so you are ready to use the appropriate activity.
I included the switch buttons in each activity as a convenience so you don’t need to return to the Activity Control Screen to change from watching TV to watching a DVD.
Creating the Different Setups
I was able to quickly set up the three examples of controlling power and switching by using the copy/paste function in the Re. I created the Family Room, setup the three devices then created the default macro example. After that was done, I simply created Family Room 1 and Family Room 2 and copied the setup from the Family Room and pasted it into the new rooms. Next I edited the setups to illustrate the different macro usage techniques.
This is also a good illustration of the personalization of the Rē. I could easily create two different Family Room setups for me and my wife. They could be started from a common setup but each extended to meet the preferences of each user. This example is for a shared iPod touch, but it could easily be extend between different iPhones, iPod touches or iPads by using Bump to transfer the settings. See more on Bump in the User’s Manual.
