wand-control.com

This product is great (thanks wifey) BUT - I can't get it to do one fundamental thing. I have a NTL (Virgin) standard cable box - and whilst I can get the wand to change channels up and down - it only will change up 1 channel, and downwards to the starting channel.

Why is this? How can I get it to change up 1 channel at a time with a swish....

I've mapped left swish to the up channel button - mapping it to a single up channel press, and right swish to the down swish....as mentioned, this works. But only up one channel...no matter how many more left swishes, the channel won't move up again. A single right swish, and back we go all ok - but no further, no matter how many more swishes....

I have been fortunate to work out volume and this is great. The great big swoosh is fantastic as on-off for the tv.

But unless I can get the cable to change to channels this is destined to get ebayed....which is a shame as I would love to be able to recommend to all my friends.

Hope someone can advise. Please help

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly.

Do you mean using a big swish to change channels? Perhaps it recognizes your _big_ swish as one up and one down flick? The big swish starts in a upward position and is one single down movement to the horizontal.

How does the wand react to your multiple left swishes ? And please keep in mind that the tip of the wand has to point to the receiving device _after_ the gesture.

HTH

Michael

if not get back to me.

Hello,

There are a few different types of Virgin Media remote controls, and some of them use alternating infra-red (IR) codes which are different with each button press - these are sometimes known as "toggle codes", and are intended to avoid multiple commands being executed accidentally if the IR beam is broken during transmission (by the cat or your wife walking between the remote control and the Virgin box).

So, the first time you press the "channel up" button (for example, though this also applies to most of the buttons), it will send one IR code (let's call it "code A", which will repeat for as long as you hold the button down), but the next time you press the same button, it will send a second IR code (B). On the third press, you'll be back to the first code A again, and so on. The Virgin box will action a channel change when it sees code A, but it won't change the channel again if another code A is received consecutively, but is instead waiting to receive code B before it'll change channel in the same direction.

The wand can only learn the IR code it sees when the button is pressed once during learning mode, which will be either code A or code B. So, repeated gestures will send the same IR code each time, and that causes the problem you're experiencing.

Fortunately, there is a work-around:
- Whilst the set-top box is expecting to see A,B,A,B for repeated channel up (and, say, C,D,C,D for channel down), putting any other IR code in between the repeated A's will also work OK (e.g. A,X,A,X for two channel up changes, or C,X,C,X for two channel down changes).
- An undocumented feature of the wand is that you can actually learn more than one remote control button onto each gesture (as a kind of macro) if you press two buttons in quick succession whilst the wand is doing the fast pulsing during learning mode.
- Therefore if you first press the button that you want to use (e.g. channel up) and then quickly press another button which has no effect (e.g. the yellow button on the Virgin remote does nothing most of the time), then the wand will learn two IR codes (e.g A,X) onto that gesture.

Now when you perform repeated gestures for channel up (e.g. flick upwards), the Virgin box will receive code A (to change the channel up), then code X (which will do nothing but make it forget that it had just received code A), then the next code A (on the next flick upwards) should cause the channel to change again as expected. We've tested the wand with two different Virgin boxes - on the first one it didn't use these "toggle" codes so there was no issue, but for the second box we had to do this workaround, then everything worked fine. It might take you a couple of attempts to get the timing right for learning the "macro" of two buttons onto each gesture, but it's not too difficult once you get the hang of it.

Sorry for such a long-winded explanation - I hope it all makes sense, but please let us know if not.

Cheers,

Richard