I have been looking into timers and prontos and its clear its not easy however i had a thought Can the pronto react to an input signal? either IP, RS232 sent into extender or even a powersense? Ideal solution would be for a web based RTC or UTC to supply a flag to the pronto to execute an action. a Triggered event of any type would be ideal, i think the RTi XP8 has an internal RTC which could be used but why not a trigger from an external source?
As i understand the pronto has to poll for data and the RFX9600 isnt great at doing this but some sort of device must be able to make the pronto think a button has been pressed and hence execute an action.

appreciate your thoughts

The problem is - even with the polling solution - it's going to be an awful lot less effective if the pronto isn't docked - because it will go to sleep.

It does wake periodically to keep wi-fi alive - and if user timers expire during that period it will execute actions (with recent firmware) - but the timers would have to be pretty short for any regular polling to take place.

The only "true" asynchronous notification available on TSU9600 is the TCP/IP socket. Everything else (RS232, Power Sense) has to be polled.

And as Dave says, the asynch is only valid if the unit is not asleep. The way to prevent the unit from going to sleep is to leave it docked 100% of the time or to enter setup and go one step above the 240second backlight limit and specify always on. Note that I'm not sure the remote does not enter sleep mode even with the backlight always on. This would need to be tested.

Lyndel

However, if you leave it always on when not docked and charging, then the Battery will drain down pretty fast. That is the reason for sleep in the first place.

A variant of the theme is to write a script which keeps the backlight on by periodically invoking it and then just place this script in selected activities. That way, the Pronto backlight (and therefore, I think, the Pronto itself) is kept on if the Pronto is left in some activities but goes to sleep if left in others.

I suspect that the whole sleep issue which is done to extend battery life is probably the reason the Pronto socket implementation does not have a "Listen for connections" function. To have that they would need to keep wifi always active ergo keep awake, and hence the battery would drain excessively.

It would be nice if Wi-Fi had a wake on Wifi but no matter how you slice it the receiver must be awake to hear the wake up call so the battery drains.