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About Control Tower
Control Tower, is an industry first online IR database
The product solves an ongoing problem in our industry as various vendor products and services converge to provide a total solution for control and automation in homes and businesses.
Most manufacturers have their own particular IR codes for their hardware. A big challenge for the installer is the integration of diverse products, along with their particular proprietary protocols, including IR code sets for their devices. They can be learned through IR learning devices from various vendors, but nowhere is there an easily accessed and usable IR database of IR codes spanning all manufacturers and models, until now.
Control Tower has two types of customers: the software or system provider and the installer/integrator, or user. Global Caché’s new IR database is available at no charge to installers and users. This service is for anyone, and can be utilised delivering up to 5 codesets per day as needed. The database solves an important challenge for installer/integrators that find themselves without critically needed IR codes and helps avoid expensive truck rolls and customer dissatisfaction when equipment is swapped out. Users can easily download the IR code for new equipment and updates without the integrator being onsite.
Global Caché provides full integration of the IR database to our Strategic, VAR, and OEM partners at no charge, when they are driving Global Caché hardware. This eases the path for many new and established software and system companies entering the control/automation market. The ability to access and serve any equipment using IR codesets can cut a product providers time to market by months and years, and eliminates an unnecessary expense.
Control Tower is based upon an innovative database structure, eliminating redundancy of IR codes and providing a platform that is easily and simply searched and implemented. Conventional wisdom is to attach model numbers to each set of codes regardless of the amount of duplication that results from this approach. Control Tower has instead used a different convention that keeps the IR database complete, yet streamlined.
Control Tower follows a strict set of rules to ensure accurate code replacement whenever possible. This ensures a highly accurate method to exploit the device change process implemented within an installation or application. So in the case of swapping a satellite or cable device, the codes will substitute perfectly every time when using the “replace component” feature. This is possible when a database is carefully constructed to ensure uniform code labels are in place.
Lastly, Control Tower offers unique and convenient online access, and finally provides the solution that integrators have been asking for.
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