JP1 Remotes

DavidEC2955 · Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 143 Location: Kansas

Over the past few year I have enjoyed the support many of you have given the "JP1" projects!!

But with the very limited supplies of supported remotes along with the change in format to '.2 & .3' which require new/different cables at a much higher cost due to the lack of serial / USB only connections on my computer systems..

I am thinking of replacing my "HTPro" and my "RCA 810"s {both which I have run out of memory and have started having sticky/non-working buttons} with the "L-H" line of remotes!

Can anybody here help point out why I might want to stay with the "JP1" and purchase a "1.3" cable and remote for almost the same cost of a refurbished "L-H" remote that has the "colored fuction keys"?

:David

vickyg2003 · Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:06 am Post subject:

Hi David, Have you finished that upgrade for the Insignia NS-BDLIVE01? I haven't seen an upgrade for it.

DavidEC2955 · Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 143 Location: Kansas

mdavej · Expert Joined: 08 Oct 2003 Posts: 4501

Honestly, for the same price, I'd go with the harmony. With harmony's LCD with soft keys and activities, you don't really need LKP's. But definitely keep your old JP1 for teaching your harmony discrete codes and macros. The harmony database has a lot of discretes but doesn't have them all. Also, most harmony's can only do 5 step macros and their top of the line models can't do macros (logitech calls them sequences) at all. So to get around those limitations, you can program the macros on your JP1 remote and teach the whole sequence to your harmony as one big raw learn.

So a cheap harmony plus the JP1 you already have is probably the most functional, cost-effective solution.

vickyg2003 · Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:17 pm Post subject:

mdavej · Expert Joined: 08 Oct 2003 Posts: 4501

Softkeys are a set of hard buttons whose descriptions are on the LCD. You can have several pages of these functions. This overcomes a major limitation of JP1 remotes, being able to look at the remote and know a button's function, rather than memorizing it or looking at a cheat sheet.

The macro limit is a little misleading. Harmony has two distinct kinds of macros - activities or sequences. Sequences can be only 5 steps. But activities have essentially unlimited steps. Your 13 step macro would be an activity on a harmony. Activities always power devices on/off, select inputs, and assign key groups to different devices (like transport keys, volume keys, menu keys, etc.). Any macro not in this category would need to be a sequence. For example, it takes several steps on my tv to toggle captions, so I make that a sequence. I have several favorite channels which are sequences too.

On my JP1 remotes, I put my "activities" like watch tv, watch dvd, etc. on LKPs like you do. But other macros aren't quite as intuitive since there aren't always good places to put them that makes it easy to remember their functions. And when I have a lot of functions on lots of shifted keys, I have to use my cheat sheet. On a harmony you can use the LCD to label stuff like that and throw out your cheat sheet.