JP1 Remotes

[Ed]

I've been away from the site for several years, having established my system and components and programming my remotes, one for me and one for my wife, to our liking. I use an 8810w and my wife uses a 8910 without the "donut". I'm using extender 3 on my 8810w and extender 1 on the 8910. I know they're different remotes, but they look, feel, and perform almost identically for us.

A couple of things have forced me to come back and re-learn some things. I thought I'd share my impressions of my returning experience in case others might benefit. Apologies in advance for the long-ish post.

Here's why I'm back: First, my Sharp Aquos TV conked out and I had to replace it. I bought a Vizio and had to install an upgrade on my existing remotes. Second, I decided to give my son-in-law a remote for Christmas. He has a home theater set up with a projector, receiver, DVD, and FIOS and has 4 different remotes lying around. Seems like a prime opportunity for a new remote. I hope he enjoys the Christmas present and gets into the JP1 thing. Finally, my 8810w has started to act up, and I need to be prepared to replace it. (From time to time, I pick it up and it's dead. I "fix" it by pulling a battery and replacing it, and it works fine again for awhile. It has started doing this with increasing frequency lately.)

Installing the upgrade for the Vizio was quite straightforward, even after being away from the details for several years. I did have to learn RM instead of Keymap-Master. It took me about a day of fiddling around to install RM, learn it, find a suitable upgrade in the files section. I did have one problem with a keymove. I had defined one that conflicted with one that I had defined for a previous upgrade which I thought I had deleted. It turns out that the keymove from that upgrade never got deleted from the .ir file. I realize now that you have to delete these manually, even if you've deleted the upgrade itself.

Buying a remote from my son-in-law required that I venture into world of the new "flash" remotes. Life would have been a lot easier, albeit a bit less fun, if I could have bought an 8810w or 8910 for him, but, alas, they can't be bought for a reasonable price, it seems. My research on the site indicated that there are JP1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and JP2 remotes available. I was led to JP1.3 and bought and RCARP05B. I bought three of them from Amazon for just a bit over $13 apiece. I wish it were backlit and I wish it had the "M" and "L" buttons on the 8810w, but otherwise it looks like it will serve the purpose just fine.

Having purchased the remote, I had to have an interface, since my old interface only worked with the old JP1 remotes. I couldn't figure out if Tommy's store was open or not, so I bought a JP1.3 USB interface from DIYGadgets. I downloaded the driver but couldn't figure out how to install it from the instructions. Then I discovered that I could let Windows search for the driver so I did that. It took awhile for Windows to find the driver, but when it did it installed without difficulty.

The 6-pin female connector on the interface is symmetric and can be plugged into the remote two ways. One is wrong. You have to locate "pin 1" and ensure that you plug it in so the "pin 1" socket matches "pin 1" on the remote. There is documentation on the DIYGadget site to help you do that. I've marked the interface so that I know which side to point to the "top" of the remote when I plug it in.

Before I configure the remote for my S-I-L, I wanted to get really familiar with it and with the latest version of it's extender, 1.05, so I decided to configure the RCARP05B to operate my system, which consists of the Vizio TV, Onkyo TX-SR605 receiver, Dish VIP622 PVR, Panasonic DMR E80H DVD/DVR, and Sony SLV 799HF VCR (yes, I still have a VCR, but it isn't used much). Once I get it working well with my system, I'll be able to configure one for the S-I-L easily, I hope.

I downloaded the extender and read the documentation carefully. Before installing it, I downloaded the "factory image" from the RCARP05B and saved it, then set about installing the extender using RMIR within that image, as recommended in the extender instructions. I could not get that to work. I kept getting a message there was no remote matching the signature, or something like that. Then I tried to install the extender via IR. It reported an "error code 1" from ExtInstall. I searched a bit on the site and surmised that the problem was it wasn't finding the RDF file for the remote. That file is packaged with the extender, but when I installed RM, IR, and RMIR, I thought the RDF file for the RCARP05B was included in the "standard" RDF directory. It wasn't, so I copied the RDF file from the extender package to the directory where the other RDF files were located. Once I did that, the extender installation was smooth.

As reported, the extender changes all default setup codes to 0000, some of which are highlighted as invalid in RMIR. I just changed them all back to the default values.

After installing the extender, I transferred device upgrades to match my system. It's tedious to re-map all the device functions to buttons on the new remote, but, apart from that, the first thing I noticed is there is no longer a "VCR" device type. Moreover, the VCR setup code that I had been using in my 8810w, 0032, was "invalid" in the RCARP05B. (I had just used the 8810w onboard device code rather than installing a full upgrade file.) I put some batteries in the remote and discovered that setup code 1232 powered my VCR up and down and was valid in the RCARP05B, so I keyed that into RMIR temporarily. Meanwhile, I went back through the file section and decided to use the Sony SLV-M91HF VCR VTR3 upgrade that mr_d_p_gumby prepared long ago. I haven't tested it fully yet, but I use the VCR so rarely that it's not a priority to get it exactly right.

Continuing to work through my devices, I noticed some strange (to me) buttons showing up on the extended RCARP05B: DiscreteOn, DiscreteOff, buttonF1, buttonF2, button3F (F3?), dev4, dev5, and dev6. I assume all of these buttons work, at least logically, like phantoms. All my macros use phantom1 and phantom2 for discrete on and off, so rather than change the macros, I opted not to use the "DiscreteOn" and "DiscreteOff" buttons.

I had to put functions for some devices on shifted keys, so I had to go back and re-learn how they worked and how to invoke shifted keys on the remote. In the process, I noticed that RMIR has settings for "Shift Keycode" and "Xshift Keycode", but there is no setting for "Alt Shift" or "Alt Shift Keycode" as there is in IR, so I'm not quite sure how to use Shift and Xshift as described in the extender documentation. Evidently, the extender assigns the "Setup" button on the remote to shift and a double press of "Setup" to get Xshift (using values of 2 and 130, respectively). This will work OK for me, but I had been contemplating assigning the "Setup" button on the remote to "Setup" functions on a couple of my devices, and I can't figure out how that would affect use of the "Setup" button to shift keys. I thought maybe a good solution would be to move the shift key to another button. For now, I'll stick to the stock configuration with Extender 1.05 and do some more research.

On reading the Extender documentation, I thought I might be interested in Scan/FAV. I had not used this in the past, and then I noticed that this functionality is not yet in RMIR, so I skipped it. This is not a high priority for me. I did try to load an .rmir file into IR, in case I want to tinker with Scan/FAV later, but I can't do that. I guess tinkering with Scan/FAV will have to await an enhancement to RMIR. I understand why this is a low priority.

After completing upgrades for my equipment, I turned to writing macros that matched the functionality in the old remotes.

I encountered the issue where there is no shift or Xshift DVR buttons available due to conflicts with other keys. I assign Xshifted device keys to macros that assign key groups to devices consistent with the selected device, using "Xshift DVR" to assign them when the DVR device is selected. As a work around, I used Xshift dev4 for that purpose when the DVR device is selected. I do have a macro defined on the 8810w's "Aux" button that configures my system to take video and sound from my laptop through HDMI2 on the TV. I'd like to use a shift DVR to invoke that macro because it seems logical given how the RCARP05B is labeled (the DVR button has a grey "Aux" label above it). I'll use shift TV for that instead.

I have more devices than available device keys. I need buttons to configure the TV to accept audio and video from my laptop and another key to configure it to take input from the Wii console. In both cases, audio is sent from the TV to the receiver and output to speakers from there. Rather than use dev4, dev5, or dev6 for these, I opted to use shifted "real" device buttons. I couldn't see any advantage in my case to using the "phantom" device keys.

Apart from a couple goof ups, I managed to get the RCARP05B working on my configuration fairly quickly and painlessly. By my standards, that's about a day's work. Others, I'm sure, would be much faster. I plan to use this remote alongside the existing one for awhile to ensure it's working properly. At that point, I'll be confident to move on to configuing one for my S-I-L.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how RMIR integrates everything from a "user" perspective, especially device upgrades and extender installation, which were both cumbersome several years ago when I started on this journey. RMIR made setting up and configuring my RCARP05B pretty straightforward. My thanks and compliments to the developers!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Ed

[vickyg2003]

[Ed]

Thanks for the tip about the foam. I found some foam in some packing materials and tried it. I'll report back results. The original foam was packed pretty tightly. Incidentally, my battery door tab broke off awhile ago, too, and I hold the door shut now with a piece of velcro, which might have allowed things to loosen up.

I had seen reports that low batteries and even using rechargeables might cause this behavior, so I switched recently to a fresh set of alkalines and that didn't correct the problem.