My new mixer supports remote control. There's an ipad app that lets you make any adjustment you'd like from anywhere in the room. You do need wifi, but you're already using the vsl1818 with a laptop so you can make the laptop host a private wifi network.

The ipad app is pretty complex because it supports every feature of the board. This is good in some ways, but can make it a bit hard to think about.

One thing I would love to be able to do is give each musician their own monitor mix and let them have their own mixing controls for it. But two problems: ipads are not that common, and the current app is pretty complex. I want a simple html UI that would work on any tablet or smartphone, and all it needs to do is let you pick an output channel and adjust how much of each input channel it gets.

I'm willing to write this, and I've asked presonus whether there's api documentation, but I suspect there isn't. [1] Reverse engineering the protocol that the remote uses might be interesting, or might be a huge pain.

(One thing I'd really like about making my own software: I could use the 6 aux outputs individually, and not as 3 stereo pairs. The math seems possible (converting (volA, volB) to (vol, pan)) but it would depend on how the panning is defined and you don't want to let an adjustment of one monitor affect another. I'd also want to support linking and unlinking monitors, so I could start with all the monitors moving together until I was roughly happy with them, then unlink them and let people make individual adjustments.)

Update 2012-12-16: I have an initial understanding of the protocol.

Update 2012-12-21: I finished, and have a version of the remote tha works on anything with a web browser.

[1] Update 2012-12-13: a Presonus rep wrote back that they "don't support third party developers connecting to the mixers at this point in time but at a later date when the OCA AES standard is complete we will eventually support this control standard."