RedEye v.2
RedEye: Control for the Whole Family
RedEye connects to your home Wi-Fi network, allowing anyone in your house with an iPhone, iPad, or PC to control your home theatre. RedEye automatically synchronizes information across all these devices, so you can pick up right where the last person left off. Now in an updated design, RedEye includes an infrared out port so you can easily stow it in a cabinet and still control your TV.
Personal.
Each person in your house can use her own smartphone, table, or PC as a controller, and more than one controller can interact with your gear simultaneously.
Simple.
One touch launches any activity – watch TV, listen to music, play a video. And custom screen layouts for each activity mean you never have to hunt for the right button.
Smart.
Multi-touch and motion gestures, free software updates, backup to a PC, integrated TV program guide, all for a fraction of the price of other professional systems.
The RedEye system can control virtually all devices that receive infrared control signals — in other words, TVs, cable boxes, stereos, DVD players, VCRs, and much more. It consists of two pieces: an iPhone application, and a hardware device. The iPhone application is a free download from iTunes, and works with all iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad models running iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
Although not required, using the RedEye system with a Wi-Fi network that connects to the Internet is recommended.
How Does It Work?
Central Storage
After you install the RedEye app, your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad can communicate with the RedEye dock over Wi-Fi. When you configure the system to reflect your home theatre setup, your configuration is stored on the RedEye device. Then if you connect with a different phone your stored configuration automatically syncs to the new controller. In fact, when you switch activities using one controller you can see the change reflected on other controllers. You can even back up your configuration to a PC through RedEye’s built-in homepage.
Wirelessly, on Your Network
Even though our computers and cell phones are on the Internet, most of our other electronics continue to work using older technology such as infrared remote controls. While infrared is reliable and affordable, it has limitations — chief among them a relatively limited range and the inability to penetrate opaque objects like walls. RedEye uses infrared to communicate with your gear, but it communicates with your phone using Wi-Fi. In other words, RedEye maintains a line of sight to your equpiment so that you don’t have to. It also means that RedEye is essentially a “bridge” that can put your home theatre online. Yes, you guessed it — with RedEye you can even control your home theatre when you are away from home.
Standard Internet Technology
RedEye is actually a small Linux server. It uses standard Internet technologies like TCP and HTTP, and sends around information in XML documents. Why do you care? Because it means that RedEye isn’t just a remote control platform for your iPhone. In theory, any Internet-connected device can communicate with RedEye. We have already released software updates that enable you to control RedEye from any PC with a basic web browser. And we are currently developing software for Android phones and tablets.
Software
RedEye is much more than a simple infrared adapter for your phone, and software plays a key role. At ThinkFlood we develop our software in-house and strive to provide regular updates and improvements. Here are some of the things that we feel set our software apart from the crowd:
Activity-based approach
We believe your home theatre should be organized around what you do, not what hardware manufacturers produce. One touch to play a movie, touch again to watch TV — no more trying to remember which audio and video inputs you need.
Smart actions
Many other remotes have “macro” capability (the option to have one button send two or more signals). RedEye goes beyond macros with smart actions that actually keep track of things like whether a device is on or off. Smart actions are particularly useful when switching activities — when you transition from watching TV to playing a DVD, RedEye is smart enough to leave the TV on.
Customizable button layouts
RedEye gives you a unique button layout for each activity you create, so the “remote” you use when listening to music is different from the one you use when watching TV. You can customize everything from button placement to size. We even have hundreds of channel logos built right into the application.
Activity templates
Customizable button layouts for each activity are great, but creating them from scratch can be a lot of work. When you create a new activity, RedEye starts you off with a well-designed template. And by template we don’t mean a single, standard set of buttons. Instead, RedEye uses information like the activity type (Watch TV or Listen to Music?) and the devices you include in the activity (do you route your sound through an A/V receiver or your TV speakers?) to determine what buttons to include and how they should function.
Macro and toggle buttons
In addition to the usual tap or tap-and-hold functionality you expect, it is easy to make RedEye activity buttons perform more advanced functions. Macro buttons can send out multiple commands — for example, a smart mute button that turns on closed captioning when turning off the volume. Toggle buttons can switch between different functions each time you press them, like the classic play/pause button on a CD or MP3 player.
Shortcut gestures
Touchscreens are great because they provide the ultimate flexibility — custom layouts for each activity being one example. However, they can make it harder to tap the right button when you are channel surfing or otherwise need to be looking elsewhere. RedEye uses the full functionality of the iPhone — multitouch and the accelerometer — to overcome this limitation. Choose from any of five motion gestures or eighteen multi-touch gestures for any button in your activity layout.
Customizable delays
When executing a series of actions — for example during the launch of an activity — it is important to be able to fine-tune the delay between commands. RedEye allows you to insert delays of up to 20 seconds in 0.05 second increments.
Quick launch
You want to be able to pick up your remote control and use it right away. If your remote is an app on your phone, then it has to launch fast and put you in the driver’s seat immediately. RedEye is optimized to launch quickly and to bring you right to the activity in progress. And now if you are using iOS 4 on a device that supports multi-tasking it’s even faster than before.
Online infrared code database
Sure, RedEye can learn commands from your existing remote controls, but who wants to do that? Our software is backed by an online database of 70,000 infrared codes covering over 1,600 device manufacturers, so there’s a good chance we have what you need. And because the database is stored on a web server rather than on your phone or the RedEye hardware, you get updates to the database as soon as they are available — no need to wait for the next software release.
Integrated channel guide
The RedEye app includes an television channel guide covering cable, satellite, and over-the-air broadcasts in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, with more countries coming soon. With the channel guide you no longer need to take up the space on your main screen while you decide what to watch next. It is also easy to filter the list based on your favorite channels so that you don’t have to scroll through dozens of screens just to find what you want.
Disabling the sleep timer
The iPhone’s built in sleep-timer helps you conserve battery, and so you want to leave it on in most cases. However, when you are sitting down within arm’s reach of RedEye’s charging cradle, you might prefer to keep the phone awake. A simple setting in the RedEye app allows you to disable the sleep timer while the application is running without disabling it for all applications.
Multi-room capability
The RedEye app makes it easy to control any RedEye system on your network. Simply tap on the Rooms screen and select the RedEye room you want to control, and the app takes you immediately to the currently running activity for that room.
Multi-controller possibilities
We designed RedEye from the beginning to support multiple controllers. Configure the system on one iPhone and your configuration automatically syncs to any new iPhone that connects over the network. Pick up your phone to take a call, and anyone else in the room can open the application and pick up right where you left off — everything from your devices and commands to the current activity update automatically and in real-time.
Control RedEye from your PC
Your RedEye runs a built-in web server so you can control your RedEye system from any PC with a web browser just as you do with your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, with full access to all your activities, devices, and commands.
Powerful scripting engine
With the release of version 2.5.0 of the RedEye app, all of our networked products now include a powerful scripting engine that allows deep customization of buttons and activities. The browser application even includes a sophisticated development environment that makes writing scripts as simple as point and click. This new engine is the basis for future upgrades that will allow control of devices using Internet Protocol, scheduled events, and layout controls that go beyond simple buttons.
Remote access
Version 1.2.0 of the RedEye application introduced the option to specify a RedEye device by IP address. For the networking-inclined, this means that you can access your RedEye even when you are away from home through a VPN or port forwarding.
Full backup and restore
Have you invested some time in getting your RedEye configured just right? By accessing RedEye’s homepage, you can backup your configuration to a PC for safekeeping. Home theatre integrators often use this feature to store common devices and commands, which can then be “restored” onto a new unit to speed up the installation process.
URL-invocation of commands
For those into home automation, RedEye offers the ability to invoke infrared commands by loading a URL using HTTP-GET. By popular demand, we are currently working on some changes that will enable launching an activity by invoking a URL, as well.
Button feedback
Although jumping through channels by flicking your phone forward and back is surprisingly intuitive and fun, tapping on touchscreen buttons just isn’t as natural as pressing hard buttons on your original remote. RedEye offers the option to play a satisfying click sound. If you are a bit more adventurous, you can even have your iPhone vibrate on each button press.
Full-screen iPad support
The RedEye app now runs full screen on both iPhone and iPad. On your iPad, RedEye works in both landscape and portrait orientations, and offers full support for multi-tasking. In landscape orientation, you can preview a full hour of TV programming information right alongside your current activity controls.
Complete Accessibility
For years Apple has been a leader in making computing technology accessible to people with diverse needs. RedEye now completely integrates Apple’s accessibility framework to bring the power of control to more people.
Multi-lingual support
RedEye is available in dozens of countries, and our customers increasingly use RedEye in their native languages, with English, Spanish, German, and Italian today and more in the works.
Toolbar hiding
The iPhone screen is pretty big, but sometimes you want to get everything out of the way and focus on your remote control. RedEye gives you a few different options to remove clutter and take control.
Multitasking
Beginning with version 1.2.0, RedEye fully supports iOS 4 multitasking, which means that you can get back to controlling your activities even faster than before.
Retina display support
RedEye now provides high resolution button images so that everything looks crisp and clear on your new iPhone 4.
What's Included:
- “RedEye” Wi-Fi to infrared bridge
- 100-240V, 50-60Hz AC power adapter
- Universal Dock Adapters for iPod touch (1st, 2nd, and 3rd generations), iPhone, iPhone 3G/3GS, and iPhone 4