Square Connect - The Puck

[mbairhead]

Looking at the pic, it's a nice looking but a bit odd device. What I don't see is how many emitters will it support? That would be a HUGE piece of info for me (plus pricing but I assume that'll come when it's released). My A/V equipment is not in the same room as my TV so I'm going to have to play with that a bit but I'm really hoping for several emitter ports.

[guessed]

@mbairhead,
The Puck itself has IR LED's inside the enclosure, and has a connector for adding extras.

I have a splitter cable attached to this connector, and it's working perfectly with 2x external IR emitters (in addition to what's in the Puck itself)

The other option is to use 2 Pucks, one for the TV, and one for the AV Stack.  SQRemote handles that deployment scenario as well.

[Boyo]

After looking at the pictures of the puck, does it send the IR 360 degrees?

[SquareConnectMat]

We have three internal blasters facing forward. Plus the external jack for adding extra emitters/blasts. We will have a three head emitter and a powerful blaster available on our web site and we have successfully used headphone splitters to extend and double up.

With all blasters and extensions in use, it uses approax 1/2 amp while blasting. As It uses a USB socket for power this is the limit for the lower spec USB powered ports. We wanted to use USB for many reasons (not least the ability to configure via usb), but for me the ability  to use the usb port on equipment such as a cable box or DVD player or the newer power strips with built in usb power was important.

In fact, we will be selling it with or without a power supply, as I just get frustrated without the number of unused "wall warts" cluttering up my home. What a waste of resources.

 

[mbairhead]

Wow, this really affects my plans. In both my bedroom and my family room, my equipment is remotely located so I will need 4 of these things and since we don't know if they're $20 or $200, and I had sort of worked them into my home A/V plan, it looks like I will need to rethink everything.

I am curious, why do the forward facing blasters? I've never found a use for them as all my equipment tends to face into a room and on individual shelves, was it just more cost effective?

[strangely]

@mbairhead, you could always have the puck hidden somewhere and have it pointing to a conventional IR repeater? I actually do this with my USB-UIRT and Puck with some cheapo pyramid type blasters...One for receiving and 2 as outputs.

Either that or ask the SQ guys to give you a discount for buying loads!

[mbairhead]

Ya, I've been trying to work this one out in my little peanut head myself. I'm sure I'll come up with some way to do this without it looking awful (two blobs on my tv, one wood and one black plastic). The question is, does the blaster need to look directly at the repeater? If not, how much of an angle can I put it? I guess I'm going to have to buy one and play with it for a while to figure it out....which might blow my "bulk purchase" option 

[strangely]

You can hide the puck anywhere in a closet etc if you buy enough repeaters.

1 pair of these:
http://www.smarthomeusa.com/ShopByManufacturer/X-10-Pro/Item/PEX01/

And 3 of these would give you control of 4 TV's:
http://www.smarthomeusa.com/ShopByManufacturer/X-10-Pro/Item/PEX03/
I actually have 1 of these across the room pointing at one TV, and another that is hidden behind a TV using an add on emitter so that its hidden.

Hopefully you have different TV's otherwise it could get tricky to control

[guessed]

@mbairhead,
It sounds like you and I have similar configurations in AV gear.  I have a Wall-Mounted Plasma, along with a 1/2 Rack of AV gear in another room...  and a long set of cables connecting it all together.

eg. HDMI, Ethernet, Subwoofer, Speakers and a Telephone connection (etc)

I use a [wired] Xantech to extend IR from the TV to the AV Rack, for any "control" that isn't normally covered by HDMI-CEC Pass-through.  This boils down to my older AV stuff, like the AppleTV, Playstation & DirecTivo.  The Onkyo accepts CEC Passthrough, so the TV "repeats" core IR functions over the HDMI connection.  I have the Xantech, as my [older] PowerMid's were flakey...


Currently I have 2x Pucks, one drives the TV and the other drives the AV Rack.  The TV Puck is tucked up behind the TV, and I use a standard IR Blaster cable (plugged into the Puck's 3.5mm jack) to come out the front and control the TV - so there's very little out front.

Technically, because of where I have the Xantech "Dinky Link" receiver, I could probably just get along with one Puck, but I wanted to test the general (2-Puck) config so I didn't do that.


For AV-Puck , I've stripped the casing off (Sorry Mat!), velcro'd it inside the Rack, and power it off of my DirecTivo's USB connection (very handy).  I have a cheap ($2) splitter on the external Jack, as well as 2x External cables.

It's worked flawlessly for me.

[mbairhead]

You can hide the puck anywhere in a closet etc if you buy enough repeaters.

1 pair of these:
http://www.smarthomeusa.com/ShopByManufacturer/X-10-Pro/Item/PEX01/

And 3 of these would give you control of 4 TV's:
http://www.smarthomeusa.com/ShopByManufacturer/X-10-Pro/Item/PEX03/
I actually have 1 of these across the room pointing at one TV, and another that is hidden behind a TV using an add on emitter so that its hidden.

Hopefully you have different TV's otherwise it could get tricky to control

I tried those pyramids a few times with very little luck. I am going to try to avoid them (or at least that brand) but I'm open to other repeaters.

@mbairhead,
It sounds like you and I have similar configurations in AV gear.  I have a Wall-Mounted Plasma, along with a 1/2 Rack of AV gear in another room...  and a long set of cables connecting it all together.

eg. HDMI, Ethernet, Subwoofer, Speakers and a Telephone connection (etc)

I use a [wired] Xantech to extend IR from the TV to the AV Rack, for any "control" that isn't normally covered by HDMI-CEC Pass-through.  This boils down to my older AV stuff, like the AppleTV, Playstation & DirecTivo.  The Onkyo accepts CEC Passthrough, so the TV "repeats" core IR functions over the HDMI connection.  I have the Xantech, as my [older] PowerMid's were flakey...


Currently I have 2x Pucks, one drives the TV and the other drives the AV Rack.  The TV Puck is tucked up behind the TV, and I use a standard IR Blaster cable (plugged into the Puck's 3.5mm jack) to come out the front and control the TV - so there's very little out front.

Technically, because of where I have the Xantech "Dinky Link" receiver, I could probably just get along with one Puck, but I wanted to test the general (2-Puck) config so I didn't do that.


For AV-Puck , I've stripped the casing off (Sorry Mat!), velcro'd it inside the Rack, and power it off of my DirecTivo's USB connection (very handy).  I have a cheap ($2) splitter on the external Jack, as well as 2x External cables.

It's worked flawlessly for me.

I'm using the Xantech IR extenders as well, which is what had me stuck...how to integrate a puck into that somehow. Of course the immediate concern is cost, if they're not a couple hundred bucks each, I'd stick one to each A/V component if I had to. We're in a wait-n-see mode for now I guess.

[SquareConnectMat]

A quick note to let people know that we arevnow taking pre orders form shipping end of October... www.squareconnect.com

Mat

[SquareConnectMat]

And we are now officially shipping...introductory price ends friday.

[strangely]

Mat, I have a friend from the UK that just visited me here in the US and he would probably like to buy one of these, is there likely to be an offer again when and if you are able to ship to Europe?

[SquareConnectMat]

Richard,

We will  of completed 'CE' testing end of next week, we are told.

There are a few more EEC regulatory hoops we have to go through hard to estimate this type of stuff... but soon.

[SquareConnectMat]

By the way the only difference between the US and the rest of the world in terms of device is a different set of prongs on the power adapter.