Part of my recent home theater upgrade included replacing my old AV receiver with the just-released Pioneer VSX-1021-K AV receiver. One of the reasons I chose that receiver was the availability of an iOS remote control app which operates over your home network. Like my recent Panasonic Blu-ray player to Indigo integration process, I did some packet sniffing on my network while the iPod app and the receiver were communicating to discover their communication protocol. What I later found out (and what’s not in the manual) is that this receiver can also be integrated with whole-home automation systems using Pioneer’s published command sets for their Elite series receivers (using a standard telnet connection, see these RS-232 commands for the similar 1120 model here) without affecting the iOS app or IR remote functions.

So, I devised a way to both send commands to the VSX-1021-K and for all response messages from the receiver to be put immediately into an Indigo variable using a persistent telnet connection to the receiver in the background. Be forewarned, this is a somewhat advanced setup, so if you’d like to replicate this with the VSX-1021-K or other networked Pioneer receiver, be prepared to do quite a bit of command-line work on the Mac with Indigo running on it.

Setup requirements:

1. Pioneer VSX-1021-K (or similar networkable Pioneer receiver. The command set is similar for all of them).
2. Wired network connection to the receiver (a Wi-Fi connection may work with the optional wireless adapter, but I haven’t tested this).
3. Static IP address assigned to the receiver.
4. Indigo 4 Pro (or later).
5. The Mac running Indigo Pro will need to be on all the time.