An In Depth Look at Crestron Pyng
UPDATE!! Crestron Pyng has been upgraded to Crestron Home OS3. Read more here – https://www.customcontrols.co.uk/blog/crestron-home-os-3/
Crestron Pyng Comes of Age!
Crestron Pyng has been around for a couple of years. When it was initially released we reviewed the product and came away slightly under whelmed – it had positives but we really saw it as a gateway for people with little to no programming experience in to the Crestron ecosystem. We design, program and install the full blown Crestron Home Automation experience so Pyng didn’t feel relevant to us.
Fast forward a couple of years and we have just taken another look – Pyng has grown up and come of age.
Crestron Lighting Controls and Pyng
For years the easiest way to program Crestron lighting was to use software called D3Pro – it’s similar to Lutron Homeworks and allows programmers to use a nice graphical interface to set up and configure the Crestron ligthing system. There were disadvantages though – the software could be super slow to load and make changes on larger systems (which our systems usually are!) which meant support was a head ache. We therefore developed an in house SIMPL program (the main Crestron programming environment) to develop and run our lighting systems – this was super quick and efficient to run and allowed us to quickly and easily make changes in addition to providing huge amounts of functionality such as adaptable lighting scenes, schedulers, integration in to AV etc etc. It was a lot of work!
The video below shows the Crestron Pyng Lighting Interface:
Crestron Pyng allows us to create the same kind of lighting systems as our custom framework – it is flexible, powerful and quick to configure. Once set up clients can change lighting scenes as they wish and easily save them down on to keypad buttons or iPad controls. We would imagine the use of D3 dropping off entirely!
Crestron Pyng and Audio Video Installations
The big surprise from our recent review was the audio video integration. For smaller systems Pyng allows easy control of a wealth of audio video sources – adding TVs and AVRs in to rooms is straightforward and simple with very little programming or Crestron specific programming knowledge required – really all that is required is the experience to work out how the system should hang together. Support for devices like Sonos and Autonomic Digital Media Servers ensures a huge amount of online content – literally something for everybody. Control of the audio video systems is extremely straight forward too – tablets, phones, touchpanels and remote controls can all be used to control the system and everything is laid out in such a way that everyone from small children to the elderly can easily use the system.
The Pyng Interface
It’s clear to see that Crestron have invested huge amounts of time and energy getting the interface right and this will transform the way Crestron systems are sold and delivered in the future. The very flexibility of the Crestron system has been an issue in the past – each system is completely unique which is great when the integrator is experienced but can lead to sub optimal systems when installed by the inexperienced. With Pyng dealers with little experience can install a Crestron system which will delight clients – increasing Crestron’s reputation and the bigger dealers (like us!) can concentrate on delivering the higher end projects – whilst quickly and efficiently delivering Pyng systems too!
The video below shows the Crestron Pyng interface for an audio video equipped room:
Summary
Crestron Pyng really has come of age and is now a very viable way to deploy systems. This will be a game changer for Crestron and some of the dealer specific sneak previews we have seen indicate Pyng is only go to go from strength to strength over time. Well done to the team at Crestron!
