Ultramote remote control tips, tricks and hacks – A Generally Useful Stuff guide

[Kronalias]

Ultramote remote control tips, tricks and hacks – A Generally Useful Stuff guide

This is a step-by-step guide to sorting out and personalising Cardonware’s Ultramote remote control software – their site is here: http://www.ultramote.com/

Ultramote has had a rotten press, primarily because of the grotty skins that they supply. It does, however, have a brilliant IR Extender which you can only buy if you buy their software as well. On that basis, if you want the Extender then you might as well make the most of their software.

I started writing the following ramblings primarily to document my own work, but then thought it might be useful to others. There again, it might not. Anyway, read on if you can’t:

Make Ultramote learn reliably from your remote control
Have problems with programming the Joystick (Up-Down-Left-Right-Enter) buttons
Change the order of your device list
Want to learn a little more about making skins
Unprogram (not re-program) a button

1. My setup. I’m using a Dell Axim X51v with A12 firmware, Ultramote version 3.2, and the Ultramote IR Extender. The following applies whether or not you use the Extender.

2. The Ultramote files and folders. You need to know a little about the files Utramote uses and where it stores them.

After installing Ultramote you’ll find a folder Progam Files\Utramote, under which there will be two folders called Data and Skins.

In the main folder there’s a file called Send.wav, which is the sound that Ultramote outputs when you press a button (providing you have sound enabled – Main => Send Sound => Enabled. You may need to tweak this file later – see the ‘Start learning your remotes’ section below.

The Skins folder holds the standard, grotty, Ultramote skins.

The Data folder holds folders for each of the devices that you create.

3. Make sure Ultramote works. Sounds obvious, but check it out.

Make sure that Start => Settings => Connections => Beam => Receive all incoming devices is ticked.

In Ultramote create a device (Device => New), call it anything, give it any skin and try to Learn using any of your remotes.

If Ultramote won’t learn then you need to get another remote control program which learns, make it learn a button, exit that program and, as if by magic, Ultramote learning mode now works!

The program I use is WinCESoft Remote Control II v2.06 Trial Version, which is available here: http://www.wincesoft.de/html/downloads.html . The trial version is fully functional but is limited in the number of transmit actions per session and the Philips Pronto CCF- IR- code- import function.

Delete the device you just created (Device => Delete). Delete any other devices that you may have created so that you start with a clean sheet for the next step.

Just because you’ve made Ultramote work once it doesn’t mean that it’ll work after you’ve repowered up your Axim, so keep RC II to kick Ultramote’s learning mode into life when you need to!

4. Getting your device list in order.

A picture is worth a thousand, so I've added one as an attachment (hope this works, I haven't done this before...)

You only really get one easy shot at the order of the device list order because:

(a) the device list is in the order of the date/time stamps of the individual device folders

(b) you can hack your way around this by backing up the Data folder, deleting all the devices in Ultramote, recreating the devices in the order you should have had them and copying your Data folder backup over the current Ultramote data folder

(c) you could just copy the Data folder up to your PC, change the date/time attributes to the sequence you want using AttributeMagic or something like it, deleting the Ultramote Data folder and copying back your Data folder from the PC

Enough of that, I digress… Sort out what devices you want, and in what order.

The order that I entered to get the above was:
Device => New => MyPower
Device => New => MyTV
Device => New => MySky
Device => New => MyDVD
Device => New => MyVCR

5. Make your skins. The instructions come with Ultramote (and are also on their website, www.ultramote.com ). I used Photoshop and then Save As’d as GIF images. Copy the your skins into Ultramote’s skins folder.

Each device has two screens – the main screen and ‘next’. The ‘next’ screen allows you to set up a further 9 buttons, and edit the text against them. I found it easier to make a skin and then edit out all the default text that Ultramote inserted (Device => Edit).

6. Start learning your remotes. This was where the fun started for me.. the soft buttons were no problem, but the hardware buttons caused problems, as follows.

Hardwarebuttonwise, Ultramote only allows you to learn the ‘joystick’ - up/down/left/right/enter – buttons. You can’t program the two hardware buttons on the left edge of the Axim.

On my Axim, when I ‘learned’ any of these I typically got a double response on playback – a bit like switch bounce.

IMPORTANT NOTE If you get this problem then it can be cured by turning the sound on in Ultramote (Main => Send Sound => Enabled). If you don’t want Ultrasound to bleat every time you press a button then don’t disable the sound – just rename the sound file. Navigate to Program Files\Ultramote and rename Send (it’s really Send.wav) to something like Sendz (Sendz.wav).

7 Unlearning – or ‘buttons and where the data goes’

Back up the top of this file I said that there were two folders under Ultramote – Skins and Data. This lot refers to the Data folder.

In the Data folder you’ll find other folders – one for each of your devices.

Open one.

You’ll see a devoptions file (which holds the names of the ‘main’ and ‘next’ skins for this device, a number – dunno what this means – and the list of texts for the nine options for the ‘next’ skin – in my case these are all blank as I’ve programmed in the texty stuff in Photoshop).

You’ll also see files – if you’ve ‘learned’ from your remote. These are the sampled infrared remote signals. They are named as follows (all the file extensions are ‘raw’:

Main screen

This is a 5x5 matrix, with the joypad hardware keys mapped to filenames as follows:

0 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23

Notice the bottom right button is not available – this is hard-wired to take you to the second (‘next’) screen for this device.

Here are the joypad button filenames:

Joypad Left 101
Joypad Right 102
Joypad Up 103
Joypad Down 104
Joypad Enter 105

Next Screen

You can only enter nine codes here (not availables are marked as N/A) and they are mapped as follows:

24 N/A N/A N/A 29
30 N/A N/A N/A 34
35 N/A N/A N/A 39
40 N/A N/A N/A 44
45 N/A N/A N/A N/A

The joypad codes are the same as for the main screen – in other words, you can only program the joypad buttons once for each device.

So if you want to unlearn a button – in other words just make it so that it doesn’t send a code when you press it – just pick the number from above, navigate to the appropriate device folder in the Data folder and delete the file. You can do this while Ultramote is running. Ultramote is pretty resilient to changing the Data and Skins folders while its running, and I haven’t (yet…) made it crash….

8 Backing Up

Boring, I know… However, if you copy your Data and Skins folder elsewhere you can remove/reinstall Ultramote and get your stuff back – either individually or the whole lot – quickly.

9 Finally

I spent this much time sorting Ultramote because I couldn’t find any other remote control software which works with an X51V (WM5) and the Ultramote Extender. If anyone knows of any software that *does* work with this combination then please could they post the info here? Thanks!

Cheers, hope this helps, Kronalias