Time to rewrite the build books for my three setups.

[3db]

I'm going on 63, (memory mostly intact or very selectiive) and when I wasn't visiting my late wife at the hospital 4.5 years ago, I wrote 3 build books, one for each system that showed connection diagrams and AVR setup for each activity. I'm starting with the bedroom setup.

 

[3db]

I'm starting the re-writing of build book (for a few reasons) for my bedroom system which is the easiest and simplest of the three AVR based systems that I have. The reasons are; 1). I'm getting older and my memory isn't what it once was. Who am I kidding, it was never there but at sometime in the future, I'm sure it will get worse. 2). Allowing me to restore the system to the baseline after tinkering with it. and 3.) trouble shooting a problem.

Here are a couple of example that I experienced yesterday.

1.) Going through the documentation process ( I call them build-books) I discovered that the AVR in the master bedroom has blue-tooth capability. This allowed me to ditch the cheap blue-tooth to stereo converter and has freed up a pair of connections on the back of the AVR as well thus reducing the wiring complexity.

2.) I incorporate screen shots with some explanation in this build book. I took lots of pics of the scene memory settings but spotted inconsistencies among them. I cleaned those memory settings up, deleted the 80 or so old pics that I took to support the build-book, took about 1/4 of new ones reflecting the cleaned version of the scene setups. I also figured out how I was going to tackle the writing of that section which also helped in reducing the number of pics required. After cleaning up the scene inconsistencies, I decided to reprogram my old Logitech remote but I could not remember the account or password for the old remote. I subsequently had to reprogram the thing from scratch; adding 6 devices, adding 8 activities, learning some IR commands from the original remotes, adding additional buttons to the screens and putting in a new wall paper background to improve on the legibility of the screen. The new corrected scene pics I took sure saved me a lot of time with setting up the remote.

The remote pics

 

[Tankini]

I had one back in the day given to me as a gift. To replace all the other remotes I had at the time 5 + remotes.

Found out later, the person who gave me that programmable remote was really for the others to use. I didn't really mind using all the other remotes as needed.

The AVR remote was huge at the time. I'd leave come back could always tell when a someone messed with my setup or change settings be it, TV, Blu-Ray anything

I still believe in "KISS" use of audio/video. Now with remotes for Subs, apps added to the piles I wouldn't mind a universal programmable remote.

Like you my memory isn't what it used to be. One once told me, welcome to old age. Thanks for sharing your tips (books).

That can be applied to other aspects. I will definitely be lurking in and out of your thread.

 

[3db]

I'm finished my document for the bedroom setup but need to do a spell check. I'm using a freeware version of Microsoft Office so I cannot generate a table of contents or list of diagrams.

I have created a spread sheet with two sheets, 1st sheet is the interconnect diagram, the second is what scenes have been assigned to that connection.

 

[3db]

I'm now working on the documentation for the Great Room System. Doing this is illustrating some opportunities for improvement on the first document so I'm correcting it and incorporating the changes into the second document; One of which is block diagram of the connections

 

[3db]

Documentation is a continuous improvement exercise. Another version of the Great Room plus the Master Bedroom setup and all colors have a meaning. I didn't document the block colors but blues are output devices , green are input devices, and orange are input/output devices all relative to the AVR. The magenta lines are HDMI cables, the blue lines are RCA cables, and black are speaker wire.