HomeGate with 3rd Party IR control?

[BeoLinker]

Hi all,

As anybody tried controlling HomeGate via a 3rd party IR kit for the PC?

I have the PC's output video distrubuted through to any TV in the house thus you can see HomeGate. What I would like to achieve is to be able to control it via a 3rd party remote control, B&O's Beo4, with the UI designed accordingly.

I already have an IR converter (with emitter and reciever) connected to the PC that has it's own macro based automation to trigger application exe's etc .I could write my own software that would run in the background, under HomeGate and click the buttons for me, although I would welcome an easier solution.

The IR kit I have opted for is from a company called Lintronic who specilise in Bang & Olufsen IR conversion amongst other things. After talking to the owner he tells me that he has contacted Clipsal about the inclusion of C-Bus commands into his firmware although nothing became of it. He is keen to integrate C-Bus and would welcome a contact from Clipsal to help him acheive it, anybody know were best to try next?

Thanks
Greg

[Colin Smith]

Firstly I believe B&O use a different modulator frequency for their IR control. You could have trouble making it work with other IR equipment.

Have you looked at myHTPC for your interface? It is basically a Windows Media PC look alike and up to recently it was free. It is now shareware and there is a 30-day trial available from http://www.myhtpc.net/
It seems to have quite a following with sites supporting it one way or another.
There are IR controllers that are designed to interface to this program via a PC IR interface.

I do have a copy (myHTPC-setup.R24.exe) that I downloaded a couple of months ago and have yet to install that is not time limited if you're interested? (3.2Mb in size).

I intend to (When I have spare time) to see if I could get it to work with HomeGate. I feel it would make a very nice interface if it does work.

Colin Smith

[BeoLinker]

Colin,

Thanks for the info about Meedio, I hadn't heard of it before and was impressed by the look & feel as well as the configurability.

This is very similar to what I hope to achieve although with C-Bus integration; my idea is to extend scenes & moods to include scenarios; not only would the lighting be orchastrated but also the genres of music etc, one button for the lot!

As with BeoPlayer (B&O's software) there are some fundamental UI issues that make it unusable when you have a large library (currently I have 900+ cd's, well over 10,000 tracks). When I tried to play the album "Get Ready" by "New Order" it took nearly 2 mins to scroll down the list. The search option was a little quicker although when you are using a touchscreen keyboard enrty is a pain!

The ideal step would be
Selection Type = Artist
Alphabetic Entry = N
Artist = New Order (from the list of 'N's)
Album = Get Ready (from the list of New Orders albums)
4 presses of the screen apossed to 78 to scroll the 3xalbum display!

Meedio is however the best I have seen so far; and given my system will only be complete in 12 months or so, it is a great system in the interim and I expect I will buy it.

If you could email me the freeware version you have for now that would be very helpful.

Thanks again
Greg....

[Richo]

The IR kit I have opted for is from a company called Lintronic who specilise in Bang & Olufsen IR conversion amongst other things. After talking to the owner he tells me that he has contacted Clipsal about the inclusion of C-Bus commands into his firmware although nothing became of it. He is keen to integrate C-Bus and would welcome a contact from Clipsal to help him acheive it, anybody know were best to try next?

Hmm... I believe Clipsal are very motivated to grow the 3rd party C-Bus market. Plenty of information on how to go about joining their "Enabled" program is available here http://www.cbus-enabled.com