Step 1: First, consider the scenes you want to control and create these via the InControl console. For example, when watching movies in our home theatre, we wanted two very specific actions to trigger when we hit PLAY or STOP on our remote control:-
- PLAY: start movie playback and dim the lights to 10% (Scene 1)
- STOP: end movie playback and raise light levels to 60% (Scene 2)
Step 3: You’ll want to save these cURL commands to separate command files. This will make it easier to call the scenes from your IR software. We've chosen to use simple .bat files named HTLightsDOWN.bat and HTLightsUP.bat. For example:-
HTLightsDOWN.bat (Scene 1)
@ECHO OFF
curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" - d "{""password"":""1234"",""sceneId"":""8351ef73-d25c-468f-b260- 7833f1b92593"",""activate"":""1""}" http://192.168.1.100:1178/zwave/activateSceneByGuid
HTLightsUP.bat (Scene 2)
@ECHO OFF
curl -X PUT -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" - d "{""password"":""1234"",""sceneId"":""7839c489-5f77-47cf-a05d- e55840778b77"",""activate"":""1""}" http://192.168.1.100:1178/zwave/activateSceneByGuid
Step 4: Now it’s time to map the two .bat files to the PLAY and STOP buttons on your remote control. There are many different remote controls and IR software solutions available which makes this step a little complicated to describe. Irrespective of this, the process of mapping key presses to actions is going to be more-or-less the same. So, we'll demonstrated the way to set this up using a standard MCE remote with JRiver Media Center. In our opinion, JRiver’sTheater View is the best Media Centre front-end available and provides built-in support for most IR remotes:-
a) Open JRiver and navigate to Options > Remote Control:-
b) Click the Commands link and select Play/Pause:-
d) With Play/Pause still selected, click the Edit button and delete the default command action “MCC: Play/Pause”. Next, click the Add Run button.
e) Browse and select the HTLightsDOWN.bat file you created in step 3 and enable the Run Invisible check box (to prevent the DOS window from showing when the scene is triggered):-
Remember, if you're new to Z-Wave, you can read more about it in our What is Z-Wave? blog article. InControl Home Automation software can be purchased here.