Here's a project I hope someone better at photoshop than I am will take up:

Make full-face stickers that will fit on a kenwood remote and make it look like a riocar remote. The membrane keys should work right through a sticker, right? So it should be just a small matter of layout and adapting one of the many scans of the rio remote and then printing them out on sticky-back paper.

I'd pay a couple bucks for one, and I'm sure others would too.

--pj

Doug Burnside has already done this, if I recall correctly. Just use an inkjet to print his template onto your own sticker material.

Remember that it's not just the button faces that have different printing on them. The buttons themselves do different functions depending on which remote you're using. A new sticker won't magically give you a feature that's missing from the Kenwood remote.

Also, the sticker material will wrinkle a bit when applied to the remote, and will tend to wear out pretty quick I'm guessing. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't use Doug's template or make one of your own in any drawing program, then print it on your own printer.

got a link? I just gogled and dug around for about an hour and the closest I can find is a post to an (abandoned) yahoo group saying that someone posted it in the files area there... which is of course members only.

Any help much obliged...

--paulj

There is no such thing as a link to it. Doug never made it public because he made it in AmiPro and he didn't think enough people still used that wordprocessor.

He will probably provide it to you if you ask him though. I suggest you PM him. (Tanstaafl).

I just chatted with Doug, and he only did an overlay for a larger third-party remote, not for the KCA-R6A.

PaulJ, why not just do one yourself in a graphics program?

the sticker material ... will tend to wear out pretty quick I'm guessing.

There's a product called a Xyron which is a cold laminator. One of the laminating materials that you can use is plastic on one side and sticker material on the other, so you might be able to print onto whatever you wanted and then laminate and sticker-ize using one of them.

They're fairly expensive on their own, but many craft stores (smaller ones, usually, where you might go to buy arty rubber stamps or scrapbooking materials -- example local to me) apparently will rent time on them, or let you use them with the purchase of something else. Look around.

Print on to normal sticky label and then put some stickyback plastic on top of that sticker.

C.

That'd work, too.

Has anyone investigated the prospect of finding a remote with the right layout that supports long presses on every button? if we could find one, we could have a real replacement for the Rio remotes that might be more reliable and easier to obtain. Creating a label and a "standard" hijack mapping would be easy. A friend of mine has one of those expensive cambridge soundworks cd-alarm clocks which had the right button layouts, but I havn't gotten the chance to test it with the empeg.

Matthew

I like that idea, Matthew.

Here is one I made over 2 years ago for the Empeg Remote its just an Excel file but knock your self out and have fun with it

I printed it Thin Plastic Sheets (picked up at office max) then used a hair Dryer to Heat it up and Form it over the buttons it looked fair at the time.

I just chatted with Doug, and he only did an overlay for a larger third-party remote, not for the KCA-R6A.

True. He sent that overlay to me last year. I could have sworn that he had made one for the kenwoord creditcard remote too. Guess not.