Button mapping, slider use, full device additions - too many questions

General
1

I finally got my R3 and got it partially running today. Even after many searches and reading, use of Discord, and looking at the online documentation, I can’t quite get my head around this or figure out why something that should be simple is so darn difficult. Full disclosure, I’m coming from a Harmony Elite setup and getting that out of my head is proving problematic.

First, I’ve added integrations for my devices (Samsung Tv, Denon AVR, Apple TV, Zidoo, Hue bridge). I’ve added one IR device (Xbox) as well, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve added several activities in one activity group so they can share states. I’ve added on and off sequences in each. Sounds groovy…. But not.

Problem 1 - absolutely none of the buttons get automatically mapped in an activity. So I have no control over anything until I manually map the hard buttons or add something to the screen. This seems odd to me, but since the configuration doesn’t ask anything about which device should control what in the activity, I guess it should be expected. Is this normal?

Problem 2 - I can’t for the life of me get the slider control to do anything in any of my activities. My searches on this issue mentioned first it’s used for volume mainly which is fine and then something about the order of devices in the activity to decide which device is controlled. There’s no order control in the activity, deleting the entity and adding it again just goes in the exact same order, and deleting the activity completely and starting over produces exactly the same behavior in ordering. So I have a great looking slider that can’t be used or programmed. What the heck am I missing here?

Problem 3 - Where o where is full device control? I mean outside of an activity when I want basically a full device remote. The Harmony has a tab for that and they’re added automatically when a device is added. Go to devices, select the device, and Bob’s your uncle. No configuration needed here. All commands are there with a bit of scrolling. Is this not possible with R3? If it is, how best to do this? Do I have to add every single command manually?

Last question or observation - in the web configuration there’s an Entities tab except clicking on it does absolutely nothing. No page shows up or error, just does nothing. Is this a known issue?

Thanks to anyone that decides to provide some insight on these issues.

2

I share many of your questions. For problem 3, click in the top left on your activity icon while your activity is running. This way you can control all entities that are part of that activity.

Another way for full control, is to add the entities to a room directly on the homescreen (or create a separate page and place them there).

1 Like
3

Hi,

  1. It is normal. You, like me, are spoiled by Harmony :joy:

  2. At the moment the slider is only used by volume control of media player entities. Sadly you cannot define yet what should be controlled. There is a theory that the first added media player entitiy in an activity get the slider. I didn´t care about that for now.

  3. For your activities you created a page in customize your remote. Create 1 more and add all entities (without the activities) to this page. When you go now to the home of the remote you see your activities and if you swipe left or right on the display your devices page is shown. I hardly need devices anymore but this was also one thing I was missing especially if the activities are not yet running perfectly.

Web configurator: leave the remote in the dock while using it because it goes to sleep after a while and you get a time out. Clear the cache of your browser. Compared to the R2 seems the R3 quite a bit faster for me and it should react quite fast at least it does for me.

Ralf

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4

Thanks for the replies and tips. At least I know I’m not doing something inherently wrong. :grinning_face:

5

It’s a bit of a challenge to get out of the Harmony mindset, but when you do it’s powerful.

You’re right, nothing for activities is mapped automatically. However, most ‘remote’ devices will have a screen and mapping already set. You can just add a remote entity to a page and use that (that is your problem 3). Alternatively, hit the ‘more info’ bar at the top of an activity and you can select any of the entities that are in that activity and then control it.

Mapping buttons doesn’t take a huge amount of time for each activity, but laying out the screen can. I don’t know how many different layouts and themes I’ve tried to get something right - but it’s so much better than the harmony when you get it right.

The slider is a challenge, and I really hope that’s one of the things they enable relatively quickly. I use my Sonos for volume control, and being able to just fix that as the slider default would be great.

6

I think the concept of integrations, entities, activities and the various groups is great, much more flexible and intuitive than Harmony.
In contrast to activities, standard user interfaces and button mappings are created for entities. Can these somehow be copied into the activities and thus used as a kind of basis interface/mapping there?

7

Not for all entities the GUI is preset. In web configurator you can copy pages of GUI but I never tried from entity to activity. I never heard about copying button mapping.

8

Copy of user interfaces from entity to activity seems to be impossible, only within entities or activities, as you said. And I also didnt find a way to copy button mappings. But it seems, that you can select and copy the user interface contents quite freely.

9

Maybe you should take a look at the Remote Toolkit that has more options: GitHub - albaintor/UC-Remote-Two-Toolkit

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