Macros; Modifying The Default Home Theatre Assignments - One for All EXTENDER A1 FOR URC-7780 Instructions Manual

4.2 Macros

Macros are central to the exploitation of the facilities of the extender. They are created through the
Macros IR.exe tab by pressing Add. As with a key move, you first select the device/key combination to
which you want to assign the macro. Then use the Macro Definition section of the form to create the list
of keys you desire in the macro. You select a key in the Available Keys list and then press Add, Add
Shift, or Add XShift to add that key in its unshifted, shifted or X-shifted version (X-shift is described in
section 7 below). Use the Insert buttons rather than the Add buttons to add the key into the middle of a
partly created list. When done, press OK.
Macros can be nested, to virtually any length. They are expanded dynamically, so the list of macro keys
does not replace the bound key in the keystroke queue until it is its turn to be processed. Since the
keystroke queue can hold up to 180 characters, you are unlikely to run out of queue space. In particular,
though it is more likely to happen by accident than design, you can create an infinite loop that will run
until you remove the batteries, or they go flat! It is this nesting capability of macros, combined with the
Special Protocols, that give the extender its great power.
If you hold down a button that has an assigned macro, it will perform a repeat action, just like any other
key. But it is not the whole macro that repeats, it is only the final keystroke in its expansion. If, for some
particular macro, you want to prevent such a repeat action, put the Null key after the last 'real' key of the
macro.
Macros are fast – much faster than in the unextended remote, though the actual maximum speed is
dependent on the IR protocol in use. This is fine if you do not want to send two keystrokes to the same
device in one macro, but if you do then the device may need a minimum time between them. This can be
achieved in one of two ways.
The time between successive keystrokes being output can be adjusted for all macros through the entries
Macro Delay Hi and Macro Delay Lo in the Other Settings section of the General tab of IR.exe. These
values are the decimal forms of the high and low bytes of a two-byte value that is, roughly, a delay time
in milliseconds. Note that this delay is additional to the native protocol-dependent delay inherent in
sending the IR signals. Suppose you want a delay of 1 second. This is 1000 milliseconds, or in hex,
$03E8 milliseconds. The conversion is easily done using the Scientific view in the Windows Calculator.
To create this delay, enter $03 in Macro Delay Hi and $E8 in Macro Delay Lo. These will change to their
decimal forms 3 and 232 respectively, which you could have entered directly, but the hex form avoids a
second conversion. There is one strange proviso. Do not enter a Lo value of zero. It is interpreted as
256, i.e. the Hi value becomes effectively one more than the entered (and displayed) value. The default
value present when you first start the extender is Hi = 0, Lo = 128, i.e. about one eighth of a second.
The other way of creating a delay is to use Pause, a Special Protocol described in section 10.5 below.
This enables you to insert a pause between two macro keystrokes without affecting the overall speed set
by the Hi and Lo values as above. The delay caused by a Pause is specified in just the same way as these
Hi and Lo values, as two bytes in hexadecimal form giving the delay in milliseconds, with the same
proviso about the use of zero as a low byte.

5. Modifying the default Home Theatre assignments

To modify the default Home Theatre assignments you create a macro with IR.exe as described in section
4.2. At the bottom of the drop-down box for Bound Key, you will see Dev1 through Dev12. When you
scroll through the list of devices in the LCD of the remote using the Left and Right scroll keys, the
extender first makes the default assignments described in section 3 for the device that becomes selected
and then generates a keystroke Dev1 through Dev12 corresponding to this device. To modify the default
assignments for Device n you create a macro with bound key Devn.
In the list of macro Available Keys, below Dev1 through Dev12 you will find 73 entries not present in the
Bound Key list. The first 72 have the form Z_Devn where Z is one of the letters C, T, V, M A or X and n
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