Hi All,
With the release of Rev 2.2.0. of the V4 firmware, our preamps are finally cutting the chord with captive remotes like the Apple remote we used for many years (until they stopped making them).
Some background. With infrared remotes you have basically 2 choices.
Approach #1 - Pick one remote, program it's codes into your product and that's the remote everyone must use with your product. That's what we've been doing since day 1. This works as long as the remote you picked remains available. And you can always have a custom remote designed just for you and your product at great expense and now you're locked into yet another vendor.
Approach #2 - Pick any remote that uses the NEC infrared protocol and teach your product how to talk to it. Moreover, make it easy for your customers to do this themselves if they decide they want to use a different remote....or lose their old one.
Most infrared remotes use the NEC protocol so there are many candidates to choose from. We now promote the use of the Function remote available from the function101.com folks. They introduced this Apple remote substitute after Apple stopped making their little silver metallic remote. It's a nice quality remote and can be configured for a wide variety of devices beyond just Apple products. There are also really nice universal remotes these days like the SofaBaton.com series.
The way this new system works is you go to the V4 controller menu, scroll down to "Remote" and select it. This step puts the controller in remote learning mode so you are no longer giving the controller commands with your remote, you are teaching it commands associated with each control function. Since you can't use the remote itself to navigate through this process, you use the encoder instead. While in learning mode, turning the encoder switches to the next control function such as "Raise", "Lower", "Mute", "Power", etc. For each control function, press the appropriate button on the remote 3 times in row. If all 3 presses generate the same code, that code is accepted and becomes the new code used by the V4 for that control function and the V4 will only respond to that specific "Raise" code going forward. Do this for each of the 7-10 control functions and you're done.
Existing V4's can be updated to work this way. The firmware update system for the V4 has not been published yet in our documentation but will be added very soon. Once it's available, I will post the updated firmware file for download.
Cheers,
Morten
