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[Bill Kearney]

Anyone using girder to control MC11's zones?  I'm thinking it'd be handy to have girder track which zone is currently 'active' and use that as a way to decide which one to send various playback commands.  That is, when using a simple remote with an a-b toggle I'm thinking that girder would keep track of which zone it thinks it active and send a play/pause/ffwd, etc to MC11 based on that.  I have only two zones at this point so using a toggle's not a big limitation.  But I'd plan on it being an integer state, not a boolean, so adding more zones in the future would let me toggle through them. 

The idea is to avoid having to use a different device mode on the remote to speak to MC.  I'd like to use those other device modes to actually control those other devices.  I happen to be using an X10 mouseremote at the moment but plan on using an RF remote eventually.  At some point I'm planning on leaving an RF remote in the other zones and will program the remote and girder accordingly. 

But for now having a single remote and a tracked toggle would seem like a safe place to start.  Anyone got tips on the girder programming necessary?

[Matt]

If you send a simple MCC command without specifying a specific zone in the parameter, it will automatically go to the active zone.  That may be all you need.

[Mastiff]

I don't think so, Matt. I believe he's the guy who asked the same question at the Promixis board, and I have given him an answer pointing him to my website. The thing is that he wants to control two zones from the same remote. I of course prefer having one remote per zone, but then my system is starting to look more and more like something you'd find in the home of rich people, but without costing that much... 

[Matt]

Thanks Mastiff.

I was thinking you could have a "Toggle Zone" button, and then route things to the active zone.  This may not be powerful enough in some cases though, in which case MC allows direct access to a specific zone via MCC commands.

[Bill Kearney]

I don't think so, Matt. I believe he's the guy who asked the same question at the Promixis board, and I have given him an answer pointing him to my website. The thing is that he wants to control two zones from the same remote. I of course prefer having one remote per zone, but then my system is starting to look more and more like something you'd find in the home of rich people, but without costing that much... 

Heh, same guy.  I figured what folks don't know over there might be known here, and vice versa.

Matt's got it right, I'm looking to have a remote be able to control the different zones.  I will eventually have a remote in each zone but for the start there's just one.  I'm ok with the problem that until you 'know' what zone it thinks it's controlling you may be in the 'wrong' one.  I'm thinking of having some sort of way to specifically set the state a a given zone. 

As in, I'm in the living room and left the music playing in the zone and want to stop the player.  Or I'm out on the deck and hate the song that's playing from the sunroom's speakers and want to skip to the next one.  While I do intend to have a remote in most locations I'd really like to have a way to use a single remote from anywhere regardless of zone.  All without wasting devices codes on the remote for each zone.

But that's all sort of beside the point, what I'm after here is a better understanding of just how to program girder to track the active zone.  Along the way I'm expecting I'll also need to know how to 'ask' MC11 what it thinks is the currently active zone.

Consider that one desire in being able to do this is based on the output of the PC running MC being modulated as an RF channel and viewable from other rooms in the house.  That way I can just flip a local TV to the right RF channel and see the console of the HTPC.

Most of the control, however, will eventually be done using a trio of gateway touchpads running NetRemote.   I may or may not use the Cinemar stuff.  It's nice and all but seems like it has an awful lot of overlap with what NetRemote does.  NetRemote will run reliably on much lower horspower devices as well.

[Mastiff]

Yeah, I'd stay away from anything else. NetRemote is king!  And using a bit of LUA code it's easy to track the active zone. Or better: Simply route the button pushes to the zone you want. Hang on until later today, I'll try to get something to you on the Girder board, this is more general Girder than special MC.