Home Remote - TouchSquid Emulation

[martins5]

With the unfortunate demise of TouchSquid, I was looking for another remote app, and was lucky enough to discover “The Home Remote”.

Given the blank slate presented by Home Remote, I looked to be facing a daunting task in how I was going to proceed, given the steep learning curve and the blank slate.

The first part was fairly straightforward, because I knew I wanted to stick with an activity based remote, and given my experience with designing TouchSquid graphics, I figured I might as well try and see if I could emulate the TouchSquid platform on Home remote.

I believe I have been successful in that endeavor and have provided a Demo copy of my .hrp file. For my needs, I focused exclusively on the Home Theater control of my equipment, so there are no lighting or environmental type activities.

I made liberal use of macros, and unfortunately they hang if no IP access is available to the Global Cache based devices. In my Demo copy I sanitized the page navigation macros (removing GC based activity entries), so the page navigation will remain functional.

Each button references a GC based device function, so when the buttons is pressed, a “timed out” message will appear. For those interested in using the emulator, it is fully functional.

The first screen you see won’t make much sense. Better to hit start to tour the emulation.

I welcome your feedback!

Home Remote TS Share(v1).hrp

[budwich]

I have come from the touchsquid app / platform and was looking at some how making it limp along as best as possibly without any knowledge / support of the internals. It was a tough slug BUT it does / did limp. I was lucky enough to cross roads with this emulation effort that has “sprung to life” in HR land. I thank my lucky stars. With some help from the OP, I have a “crafted version” that controls about 8-9 devices ranging from AVRs, to displays, to source media, to switches to X10 light control… the only thing missing is the “kitchen sink”. I look forward to “continued life”… long live HR / hrps.
Besides the contained capability of design / flexibility, the ability to generated a design that can live / play on three platforms at any instance is special. No more “fighting” in the house over who has the “controller”. Of course, nothing is free and things could always be “more polished” when its a “free source” but the “polishing” can be accomplished with a bit of work / reading / watching / playing.

[martins5]

I forgot to include some images.

Here is an original Home Page image of the classic look TS.

I did some extensive graphic redesign of the TS classic look in the next image.

And here is what the Home Page looks like in the Home Remote emulation.

Once again TS classic look for an activity page.

TS activity page with graphic redesign.

Activity page with redesigned graphics in Home Remote emulation.

[martins5]

Here are a few more images showing possibilities with the extensive supporting graphics package. For those who might be interested, I could make the graphics available separately from the emuator.

[budwich]

I thought I would add my “flavor” to this work.

Like the others posted by the OP, this is an example of one “main screen” showing a selection of possibly activities and remotes across the top. The current activity screen icon is outlined with blue to indicate the current “target” of operations / settings.

This is an example of the favorites screen. This allows quick selection of channels based on sat chan icons plus also web sites for other operations along with basic sat receiver navigation for easy of use therein.

This is an example of an amp overlay. Lots of amps these days are more media “centric” as opposed to sound, video, and switching control. A quick overlay allows me to reach into the amp quickly for certain things (eg. on-screen nav / adjustments / receiver display controls) and then go back to the base level activity there after.

Most / all devices are IR controlled although the receivers (yamaha) could be ip api / web controlled… maybe in the future although I find IR works well for most “aged” / new stuff.

Thanks again to martins5 for the creation of the emulator and help along the way…plus thanks to THR for their creative / useful system.