Inside information of the Pronto

The Philips Pronto is a programmable remote control. It looks a bit like a Palm Pilot, but it is the most flexible remote control on the market (below the $1000…). The interesting thing with the Pronto is, that it is fully customizable with the Pronto Edit software.

Unfortuanlly the Pronto Edit software is for Windows only, so i reverse engineered the format of the CCF files and also tried to get information about the communication with the Pronto.

Source code for parsing a CCF file:

• Parse.cp (last change: 10. Nov. 1999; now with support for hidden panels, timers and beeps)
• ParseGCC.cp (last change: 12. Jul. 2001, source code for the GCC on Linux systems)

Pronto has a serial port for the communication with a computer. The communication is pretty simple.

• Philips Pronto Homepage
• Pronto Edit
• Remote Central
• Tonto A clone of ProntoEdit written in Java and therefore cross-platform