Disabling Plasma controls on a T6000 Profile

[Morgan81]

I was a little curious, is it possible to disable the functionality of the plasma controls for the Pioneer plasma?
What I would like to do is have the plasma on all of the time and never have to worry about a user changing the input or turning the power off.
Is this even a good idea since I'm not sure if the power gets cycled will the monitor return to the standbye setting.

[Steveh]

There is a great little box from Extron which you can connect the the RS232 port on most plasmas projectors etc which gives you web control of the screens, but more cleverly you can set actions, so you can program the screen to switch on at a certain time, off at another or change channel. You can also set it so if an input source is changed it is changed back!

Cant recall model but it is part of the IP product line....see extron.com

[Morgan81]

I knew of the add on's you could get but it would of been nice to throw a profile in a room, and never have to worry about users playing around with it. I guess we could always put a plastic plate over them and screw it in if it becomes a problem.

[tom9933]

I guess the question to ask Pioneer is there an api command that you can send through the serial port that will disable the front panel controls. Many times manufactures do this so that when you are using a control system the buttons are locked out, look for executive mode. For what its worth on a lot of our TV’s we either have to cover the buttons with a plate or open up the TV and disable the buttons.

BTW the Extron product that Steven is talking about is part of the IPLink product line. We use a ton of these boxes to manage our classrooms. They make a whole line with various types of connections but a two port serial (IPL TS2) is probably a good place to start for your application. Here is a link: http://www.extron.com/product/product.asp?id=iplts2

As far as the programming rather than leaving the panel on all the time I’d put one port of the box on the panel and the other on the codec. In this way you can shut the display off whenever the codec goes to sleep and turn the display on when the codec wakes up. We do this for the rear display in some of our rooms with a control system and it works great!

[Morgan81]

Thanks Tom, I should take a look at those boxes in more detail. It's too bad Tandberg didn't include them with the Profiles :)

[AVGeek]

pioneers have a secret "integrator mode" menu that may have these functions, you can call their tech support for the buttons to press to access this, otherwise here's some api info . .
1. the string format is a hex 02 then the ascii unit id then the ascii command then a hex 03
2. the command for locking the plasma buttons is FCLS01, the command to unlock is FCLS00
3. i think they ship with a unit id of 02, so the lock buttons command would be /02/02FCLS01/03/ (note i put the "/" in just to designate the hex characters)
4. standard baud of 9600,8,N,1
5. i do this with amx and crestron but the challenge is finding a program like hyper-terminal that will send a combination of hex and ascii characters (or if you had one that would send just hex i imagine converting the ascii characters to hex numbers would work, surely a geeky-er person than myself can help you with finding such a program)