Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd. - Support Forums and Community

All,

I'm having trouble getting a clean way to increase/decrease the volume on my Yamaha AVR's and would appreciate some input/ideas.

As far as I can tell, there are 3 ways to implement volume control:

• Using Volume Control widgets, or
  
• Using Inc/Dec widgets, or
  
• Using Slider widgets.
  

None of these is "perfect", since:

• The Volume Control widgets take up too much real estate on my templates.
  
• The Inc/Dec widgets aren't very responsive - the Yamaha driver has about 200 volume "steps" AND the first issuance of a volume change command is wasted (it puts the receiver in "volume change mode" rather than actually changing the volume), so it takes many keypresses to achieve an audible volume change.
  
• The Slider widgets work OK but have 2 drawbacks - since the slider represents the entire range of "steps" the usable range of steps is concentrated in the middle of the slider. Also, accidentally pressing at the bottom or top of the slider widget adjusts the volume "way down" or "way up". Not that big of a deal when you accidentally turn the volume way down, but a little startling when you accidentally turn it way up.
  

Ideally, I guess I'd like to have a slider control that has a limited range - on the Yamaha driver scale of 38-232, I'd like to restrict it to 90 to 160 or so. A backup solution would be to have the keypress issue several volume change commands. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to accomplish either.

How are other Yamaha owners handling volume control on templates?

Any non-Yamaha owners have thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Joe

One thing you can do to make the slider better is to show the value that you are going to get when you drop it. I'm not sure if you've done this yet or not. If not, you can check the tutorial video on volume knobs/sliders. This way, it's more accurate since you know how much you are changing it.

But, otherwise, those are pretty much the options for now.

Though, instead of inc/dec buttons, you can do a set of four buttons that are arranged vertically like:

Multi-step Up
One Step up
One Step Down
Multi-Step Down

So the inner sets are the fine movement, maybe two notches at a time. While the outer ones move maybe 6 or 8. You do have to press it each time to get something to happen, but you with the two ranges of movement, you can usually make changes within the commonly used range pretty easily.

Hey Dean

Thanks for the quick response. Of course, right after I posted the lightbulb came on and I came up with a fourth approach. Basically I used a command widget that reads the current volume field value into a variable, adds/subtracts "3" to that value, and writes the new value back to the volume field. This gives me vol up/down buttons that are a little "snappier" than the inc/dec buttons.

WRT showing the slider value - I was doing that, but it still doesn't save me from having the volume "cranked" because someone accidentally touched the right side of the slider - maybe not a problem on some households, but with a 6 year old and his friends it's something I have to guard against.

Thanks again

Joe