SonyMeeting is an autopart that adds a new meeting type to the calendar of your Newton. A Sony meeting very much resembles a traditional meeting, but carries additional information about the TV channel and can be routed to your Sony VCR via IR. Your VCR should then be programmed for a recording at the selected time and channel.
SonyMeeting will only work on OS 2.x and for some Sony and some Philips VCRs. I have tested it on a Sony SLV-E7 and on a Philips VCR whose name escapes me.
SonyMeeting is not a general purpose remote control. For this purpose, I recommend ShowMate which is scriptable and has some nice other features. Please note that I am biased since I am co-author of ShowMate.
I hoisted the Jolly Roger.
The German version now cooperates with MoreInfo. Previous versions could not be opened from MoreInfo's auxilliary button because they expected the Calendar to be open. I will soon post the English version.
SonyMeeting has outlived it's name - it also supports Philips now.
Recent additions were Long Play and alternate inputs
(Line 1 and Line 2), also proper landscape support.
I was even able to verify it works on an MP2k
SonyMeeting with it's source code for Steve Weyer's NewtDevEnv is covered by the Gnu Public License.
Please send email if you use SonyMeeting.
In fact, you might even send email by tapping my underlined name in the About slip.
The name is underlined so that everybody immediately thinks of a hyperlink to a mailto: - Heck, nothing is intuitive.
The VPS checkbox is a fake. It's not supported yet.
See? Philips is supported.
I will try to support more VCRs, but I need to know their codes and protocols. When I started doing it for the Sony, I first called Sony technical support and simply asked them. They could not help me, but they might have if they had been able to. (Actually, they gave me a Sony Tokyo number, but I didn't want to pay that bill)
The Philips codes I got from Ola Hansen (thanks, Ola!). He got them from Philips technical support Sweden simply by asking
So, if you want your remote supported, you might first try to call technical support and make them send me the specification.
If this doesn't work and you still want it, you might record what your remote control sends. I did this with a Sharp IR sensor that already filters the 40 kHz carrier and a DOS program a friend of mine had written. Very nasty piece of software, that...
Another possibility is that you send me your remote control and a copy of the users manual. If you cannot part with your remote, you might consider to buy a learning remote, feed it with the codes that interest you and send that to me.
Also I think the HP 48 calculators were capable of recording slow IR, if you can a get a hold on one, check ftp://nada.kth.se/home/d89-bga/hp/remote/
I would not recommend using a oscilloscope unless you are of the patient kind.
SonyMeeting is not considered useful. You might be able to impress people, though.
There is a bug in calendar that does not allow to enter meetings that cross midnight. Consequently, you cannot enter meetings with your VCR that cross midnight.
SonyMeeting does not support repeat meetings. The Sony and the Newton have different ideas
about repeat meetings. The Newton supports daily, weekly, monthy meetings & so forth,
whereas the Sony concentrates upon repeat meetings like: daily, Monday to Friday, Monday
to Sturday and so forth.
I should probably support daily, weekly and monthly meetings.