Masahiro from Green Works Inc in Japan is an enthusiastic user of CommandFusion products. He recently sent us this case study of a recent installation he carried out at a residence in Tokyo, Japan.

About 5 years ago, an elderly 70 year old woman had a home theater room installed in her home in Tokyo, Japan. However, due to the amount of remote controls required to even watch standard TV and the complexity of the start up procedure, she was reluctant to use the home theater system.

The customer had contacted an architect about these problems, the architect then contacted Green Works and asked Masahiro to assist with providing recommendations and quotations.

Masahiro visited the customer and quickly recommended that all the remotes be replaced by a single iPad running CommandFusion's iViewer 4. This would allow the control interface to be customised to suit the customer and would remove the need for many different remotes.

It was also recommended that the 5 year old projector be replaced, and a new Blu-ray player be installed. To control all this, Masahiro suggested a small CommandFusion hardware installation to allow the iPad to control all devices seamlessly.

After the quotation and recommendations were accepted, the team at Green Works started work on the design of the graphical user interface (GUI).

Any unnecessary buttons or commands were not included int he GUI as these would only clutter the interface and confuse the user. For example: the number buttons 0 - 9 were not included in the interface. This is because after speaking with the customer more, it was discovered that she only changed channel by using the channel up and down buttons - she never used the number buttons to pick a certain channel.

To make the GUI extra user friendly, the current channel details are shown on the GUI. Because the GUI had no way of receiving feedback from the TV with the current channel name, Masahiro programmed some JavaScript that worked like this: If current channel is CH 1, and channel up is pressed, then channel 2 details are displayed in the GUI. iViewer would then remember what the current channel was so the GUI and the TV were always in sync. This was duplicated for all possible channels.

A small CommandFusion hardware system was quickly designed consisting of:

• a CF-Mini in the cabinet to control the AC receiver (RS0232C), Blu-ray player (IR) and tuner (IR)
• A IR Blaster mounted on top of the projector to control the projector screen via IR
• A LAN Bridge to provide the ethernet connection to iViewer 4
• a single power supply to power all three CommandFusion devices via CFLink