So in case you're not keeping track, Crestron now manufactures over 30 variations of touchpanels and hand-held remotes as well as an unspeakable quantity of keypads. This affords the Crestron integrator an opportunity to pick that perfect user interface for the application. The only question is "which one"?

As a Crestron Authorized Independent Programmer, or CAIP, I believe that the best service that I can provide to my Dealer base extends far beyond programming. With so many user interfaces in the mix and an ever growing list of SKU's coming down the production line I find much of my time is spent helping Dealers distilling the Crestron catalog down to a core set of products. No Dealer can ever be successful by selling a different product compliment into every project. That's called re-inventing the wheel, and doing it too often has a tendency to absorb all the profit in a job. So many Dealers appreciate our ability to couple knowledge we have about the Crestron line with what we know of their business to help shed some light on an appropriate product mix.

For many years all us programmers salivated about the next coming touchpanel model. Believe it or not color was a big deal at one point, and when I say color I mean all 8 that we had to choose from at the time! Composite video on the panel was another, now we are gathering steam! And so as the Crestron user interfaces gained in functionality a funny thing happen; I wanted a remote in my hand. A good ol' AA battery driven remote. After the huge resolutions, expandable memory, Ethernet and other killer features arrived I found that panels were getting harder and hard to do the single thing that end users do the most of...watching television.

As almost every portal for watching live TV, recorded TV, DVD, Blu-Ray and IPTV evolved a common thread was developing. The appearance of the on-screen menu or navigation became the de facto standard for getting around the media. So I watched with discomfort as my end users looked down at the touchpanel, pressed menu, then they looked up at the display, then they looked down and pressed left, then they looked up at the display. Well this didn't go on for very long before I realized that all these devices needed to be navigated with a tactile remote that fit in the user's hand. That way the user, once they learned the "feel" of the remote could drive with one hand, without looking at the UI and without having to be constantly moving their attention from device to device.

Thus begins my love affair with the Crestron ML-600 . Yes I know it's an older model, yes I know it's a one-way RF device. But there is one thing that I do know. The thing is bomb-proof, the batteries last a life time compared to your cellphone and you know what? Most people can navigate with this simple little device tacitly! But, as a system integrator you must think I have lost my mind not selling plenty of those big shiny touchpanels. Not completely. I feel strongly that any large project should have no more than 3 resolutions of UI's. Any more and you are asking the end user to move from UI to UI all the while needing to remember the capabilities of each. The first step in UI selection for me is to put a ML-600 in every room that has a TV. Yup, that's right every room. That way the end user can lie down, slouch in their chair or even run on the tread mill and still be able to control the volume, mute and menu functions with out looking at a touchpanel. Next in the selection process are the wall mounted touchpanels. Hopefully you have landed a project where you have been able to educate your client on the benefits of having a wall mounted TP in each zone. And please don't sell the client one UI and tell him that "it can run the whole house"! That is topic for another post. So once you have put a remote in their hand and one on the wall it is time to focus on what I call the anchor panels. Again, since you have landed a project with a decent budget you have every sub-system imaginable. Systems to be integrated include lighting, HVAC, security, cameras, the whole smash. So to be able to give the end user enough real-estate to get around the detail of these systems you need some anchor panels. These are typically tilt models that should be in the theater, kitchen, master bedroom or any other areas where the folks who sign the checks spend the most time. So everyone gets covered here. The non-directional hand held remote that is tactile, the in-wall UI to cover room audio and the sub-system basics and the anchor panels to support the whole project.

So at CEDIA 2009 enter the Crestron TPMC-3X . Oh god, its an ML-600 with a touchpanel bolted to it! Now how do I treat this? Well reports from the field look pretty promising so you can sell the TPMC-3X in place of a ML-600 and still keep to the above concept. The 3X has a few things going for it. First of all is is a two way RF device. That takes care of the directional drawback of an IR remote. Next the industrial design of the 3X allows you to fit it in one hand and still get around! Further, no propriatery gateway is needed, but it is recommended for support reasons that you use the Crestron CEN-WAP-ABG-1G or CEN-WAP-ABG-CM access points, but you would need those anyway to provide WI-FI coverage for the end user. Other things that the 3X has going for it include good battery life, support for streaming video, back-lighting of the buttons and an assortment of docking options . There is more, but that is a good start.

So my beloved ML-600 has some serious competition. I so want the ML-600 experience to stay the way it is and always has been. However I do find myself gazing at that sleek glossy jet black wrapper on the 3X and feel like I have to come clean the next time I pick up my ML-600. I am indeed conflicted. While it is tactile, and a touchpanel, we as programmers need to be mindful of what we try to stuff onto the 3X's 76,800 pixels. End users aren't going to be happy if they are flipping through 15 pages trying to schedule their 10 HVAC zones so make every pixel count. Please use that 2-way 802.11 RF power sparingly! Don't get all giddy because you are no longer limited to 5 characters for naming each function. Find a balance between just enough feedback and controls and making the UI far too cumbersome.  After all you owe it to the simple elegance of the ML-600. 


-Jim Felderman
President
ControlWorks Consulting, LLC

Disclaimer: ControlWorks is not an agent or employee of Crestron Electronics, Inc.  The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer. Product representations and capabilities may change and should be verified by the user independently. Images are the property of their respective owner.