Hey all. Thanks already for the help you've given me in getting into my Pronto habit. I'm now trying to figure out the best way to handle power states of each device in my system. I'm not fundamentally concerned about how to program the remote. I'm more concerned about figuring out what I really want the remote to do?

So, when I enter an activity and actually do something, I want to turn on appropriate equipment. However, when I leave an activity, I don't necessarily want to turn the stuff off. Also, my remote will be controlling two zones, so I need to be able to jump back and forth between two activities (or lighting) without turning off devices used in the other activity.

I've become a very capable prontoscript coder, and have quite a complicated two-zone foundation with a globally stored "PersistentState" XML object.. So every page in every activity knows whether "Z1" or "Z2" is "active" and knows which activity is "active" in each zone.

So, options are:
1) Don't ever implicitly turn zones off. Force the user to press the power button and select which (if not all) devices to turn off.
2) Knowing which activities are active, Upon entering a new activity (in a particular zone), assess which devices are required for the two "active" activities and turn off all unnecessary devices.
3) ???

There have got to be other options, but I'm not sure what they are. I'm thinking of the above two, option 2 may be the better/easier to use one, but before I start coding it, I curious what people think about the two presented, and the others I haven't thought about.

As an aside/sort of survey... on your prontos, what happens when you press the "power" button?

Finally, this may be a question for the offices of Gordon and McGee... Two of my devices are controlled by IP (Media Player and Receiver). How would you power off the whole system? Maybe the best way I thought of was setup a "Power off" page in each of those two activities with page scripts to turn off the devices. Then execute those page jumps amongst other "Power off" codes in an Action list. Can I still do that with asynchronous sockets? Any other thoughts?

Thanks again for everyone's thoughts on the above matters!

- Mike

I do not deal per se with activities and pages when thinking about how the pronto functionality should be looked at. I think about what it is I want to do.

At the pronto level I prefer things as a single activity whenever possible and only use multiple pronto activities when there is just about no relationship between the functions I am trying to control.

In my world I think of the prontos by location as the locations generally define the functionality. There is a Master Bedroom Pronto, A Great Room Pronto, a Guest Bedroom Pronto and a Theater Pronto. Those names are actually where that specific Pronto lives. The xcf that goes into each of the Prontos is identical (except for the Guest Bedroom as that is a 9400). When each pronto starts it ascertains what room it is in and then starts the Pronto activity that is for that room.

The Theater Pronto is the only exception to this because the Theater is really the adult playroom and serves as a Theater, TV room, and a Music room. I will discuss the Theater since that sounds the closest to what you are doing.

The Theater Pronto has two main Pronto activities Music (SlimPronto) and the control of the Theater. The main screen (not the home screen) for the Theater Pronto allows for the selection of the basic functions Theater, Music, Games. Games is just to show off what the Pronto by itself can do and are the games others on this forum have written and contributed.

The default function for the Theater Pronto is the theater, so the Power button on the main screen will completely turn on the theater which is architected in the Pronto as a single multi-page activity. It turns on all the components that are not in an "always on" state and sets the A/V chain to the default configuration of a watching one of the two DVR's. On any other page of the Theater activity the Power button will completely turn off the Theater and return to the main page of the Theater activity. Turing on the Theater completely dims the Theater lights to off and plays a music track (Hooray for Hollywood) while that is happening. Turning off the theater puts the "house" lights back on. Every page of the Theater activity has a row of buttons on the bottom which change the A/V chain, that is connect up a different source. Once connected and powered on that source is left on unless turned off by a button on its page, or by shutting down the Theater activity.

The pronto gets feedback from the PC that it talks to which controls the theater in one case. When dealing with the movie Librarian it needs to knoiw based on the movie selected what page to put up next. This is bwcause the page for the BR player is quite different from that of the DVD changers. I have thought about making them the same, and will probably do that when I get a BR changer

SlimPronto works in a similar manner. The music player is off, the Power button turns it on. If the Player is on the Power button turns it off. If the Power button is held down for more then 2 seconds when the player was on, it turns off all players assuming that they were synchronized for a party and goes to the Theater's Main screen.

Hope that helps