I have several devices in my theater that take anywhere from 30-50 seconds to fully boot up after a power on command. Initially, I didn’t think this was a problem, I just inserted the appropriate delay after power on before sending any other commands to the device. This works fine when everything is off. However, once the system is on and I simply want to go from, for example, watching BluRay to watching Cable, when I select the Cable activity, all of those delays are programmed into the activity and I have to wait a couple minutes before the inputs switch and I’m able to now use my Cable controls.
Other than having two different activities for each source, one for power off condition and the other when power is already on, or just leaving everything powered on all the time (not recommended by OEM) has anyone come up with a more elegant way of handling this? I’ve played around with the Toggle Activity and the Conditional Commands but since these don’t work on things like Delay, I haven’t found a way to use them.
That’s what Toggle Activities are for, or at least a primary purpose. You make a toggle activity like “TV Power”. It has start and stop commands with appropriate delays. Each Media Activity starts the Toggle Activity. If it’s already on, it won’t be re-executed.
In one room I have a TV with 2 devices on 2 HDMI ports. The TV takes 7 seconds to completely power up and thus be ready to execute a command to switch inputs. What I’ve done is simply added the switch input command twice within the device in the activity setup…once immediately, then once again after 8 seconds. Only real “downfall” I see is that If the TV is already on and on HDMI 2 when I select the activity on HDMI 1, it will switch immediately, then 8 seconds later I get the input dialogue on the screen, but then it goes away after a couple seconds. Benefit is I don’t have an inline activity (is that what replaced “toggle” in v6 which I’m beta testing??) on my main room screen.
As with most things, there probably is a better way, but this has worked well for me.
Thanks, Will. The Toggle approach worked great once I figured out that I needed to remove all of the power off commands from the Stop tab in my setups. I didn’t realize switching from one Activity to another in the drop down menu would automatically execute all of the Stop commands. I now only use the System Off when I want to turn off the entire system instead of doing that in each Activity.
