A message to all our extender designers

[Tommy Tyler]

I don't frequent this section, so if what I am about to say is old stuff that has been discussed before, then as Rosanne Rosanadana used to say on the old SNL show, "Never mind!"

A while back I was sharing 6131 extender macro problems with Liz and she came up with what I thought was an excellent idea. Why not provide a way to single-step through a macro, as an aide to trouble-shooting problems. In a good sized macro involving numerous devices, the signals come spewing out of the remote too fast to watch the responses of individual devices. Debugging is a trial-and-error process, unless you try to insert long delays between successive commands. That's not only tedious, but there's no guarantee the macro will work the same after the delays are removed.

Tommy

[johnsfine]

Maybe another extender designer will think of a simpler way to do that, but to me it sounds harder than it's worth.

Without a lot of visual feedback, even being able to step through still requires a lot of understanding and assumptions for the user.

If I want to troubleshoot a macro, I use CaptureIr to see exactly what the macro sends and exactly how fast. That still leaves all the questions about how devices respond, especially at speed. But it at least divides the troubleshooting on the clear boundary of whether the remote is sending what you thought you programmed it to send.

Of course CaptureIr is extra hardware. So if an extender enhancement were more practical, it would be a better idea. I just think that enhancement does too little a fraction of the troubleshooting at too high a cost in extender authors' time.

[Capn Trips]

Great idea, Tommy. Of course I have no idea how one would design such a routine, but if one could do that (kinda like using F8 to step through a computer's boot sequence) it would be awesome.