Sorry, it was asked multiple times that I explain some of the things in my earlier post. I wasn't avoiding or ignoring it, I've been working through our next prodigy system problem, and i wanted to spend some time on the phone with crestron TBS to make sure I wasn't making a mountain out of a molehill. I would also just like to throw it out there, Crestron has some of the best tech support I have ever dealt with. When they get on the phone, they are on it untill your problem is solved. If they can't solve it, they will find someone who can.

Let me start with the latest one, because it will demonstrate the "sandbox" idea fairly clearly. I'll leave out the part #'s because they don't matter. There's two parts so I'll break them up.
System:
plasma
receiver
bluray
comcast box
Can't get much easier then this right? Except it's the customers receiver, which won't switch hdmi, so the tv is doing the video switching, receiver is doing audio. So I build it in composer, and end up with three problems.
1. TV power on and off works, but source codes are wrong, so I figure I'll just add another display device in system builder, and just change the source codes out. MY BAD! This is a no no, system builder cannot deal with having the second device, even though I manually went in and reassigned the codes. Builds some really weird pages, so I start over. Go into DEAL and add the correct source codes and save in user database, so all the codes are in one device. This is my screwup, and tech helped me through it.

2.Bluray commands are repeating 4 times with one button push. This was a crestron code set I used out of their database. Turns out all the codes are set to min 4 repeats. So I have to open up DEAL again, change each code, resave it under a different name in my user database, then go back in and change over to my new codes. PITA!

3. When the system built, it included two blank pages for the comcast box. Just blue backgrounds, plus the main page I need, and a keypad page. So when you choose comcast, it comes up on a blue screen. My inital thought was to just delete the blank pages, but again this is apparently a bad idea in systembuilder, so I just copied one of each of the pages I did need onto the blank pages. Not the end of the world, still a pain though.

So if that was it, I could chalk some of this up to learning curve, and stuff I know not to do again. But here comes the real problem for us. Customer also has a two channel setup in this same room. Mark Levinson cd player that does the volume out to an amp and two B&W spkrs. He wants to be able to also control this setup from the remote. The answer is no. The guy at Crestron told me that that was too far out of systembuilders box(his words). The only way to make that happen was to do it in Simpl.

I also had to edit the touchscreen graphics in VTE pro for all the devices because the buttons it generates were either worthless or insufficent. i.e a track forward and back for the bluray. I added the colors and the pop up menu.
I could do this entire program on urc or rti in about 20 minutes on a bad day. Not so much with prodigy.

We run into funky control requests quite often. If you don't then this may not be that big of a deal for you.

I will go into the other system tomorrow if you would like, just let me know. On a side note, I did spend the majority of today with our programmer starting to learn how to do this in Simple.