First Impressions and feedback

General
1

A round-up of my first impressions after using my Remote 3 for about a week.

Please let me know if I’m off base on any of these points, or just missing something!

The Good:

  1. The build quality is fantastic. Solid, slick, hefty, pleasing to hold.
  2. The Web Configurator software is extremely polished, professional, and (for the most part) well thought out. I don’t think I’ve run into any bugs, which is damn impressive.

The Not-So-Good:

  1. While I was hoping to use Home Assistant commands for most button functions (to keep things centralized/standardized), but the wi-fi startup lag makes that impractical for anything that I want to be usable immediately on picking up the remote (navigation, play/pause, volume, etc.). This means I have to either use old-school IR from the remote for those commands, or have wi-fi always on and drain the battery.
    (For future models, maybe an always-on Bluetooth LE connection to the base, which relays the commands?)

  2. The remote doesn’t sit well in the dock; it’s very wobbly, hard to tell whether it’s fully seated on the charging pins.

  3. The remote’s ergonomics are… challenging: Try picking it up from any smooth, flat surface, and there’s just nothing to grab onto. Rounding or flaring out the sides would help with that.

  4. Can’t rename or delete custom learned IR codes.

Suggestions:

  1. Having two different touch-screen layout modes doesn’t make sense to me: There’s a wonderful grid-based editor for Activity Pages, but just those clunky, full-width-only buttons on the “home” screen. Why not use the same UI for both?

  2. Before you can add Activities to the home screen, you have to grasp the logical leap that Activities are Entities. That was a huge, multi-hours roadblock for me; maybe because everywhere else in the configurator, “Activities” and “Entities” are separate lists.

  3. Having a background image on the home screen looks great, but makes the Activity screens very stark in comparison. Show the BG image on the Activity screens, and make the button opacity adjustable.

  4. Since my remote is in an Activity 99.9% of the time that I’m using it, it would be nice to always have the time/battery/wi-fi display at the top.

1 Like
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Remote Two has a Keep Wifi connected setting that speeds up the reconnection after the remote wakes up from sleep. It still has to reconect to all integrations but doesn’t need to wait for a network connection. This should soon be available on Remote 3 as well but UC needs to fix some bugs with this with the wifi chip vendor.
Keeping the wifi connection always active doesn’t draw that much battery. The option you are probably reffering to is prevent sleep. This keeps the whole system alive and not just the network connection and therefore has 7-10% per hour battery consumption.

This is posssible but currently only with the core api and not through the web configurator.

3

Thanks for the clarification! I didn’t know there was a separate “keep wifi connected” vs. “keep awake”; I’ll look for that in a future update.

4

Sure hope they fix this soon. I have to wait like 4 - 5 seconds after picking up the remote before the keys respond. Not the end of the world, but annoying AF.

1 Like
5

You can delete custom learned IR codes in the WebUI by clicking on the 3 dots next to the command in the device and selecting Reset. You are correct that you can’t rename them though.

6

You must differentiate.

  1. prevent sleep keeps the remote awake if an activity is running and you have instant reaction. It costs around 5%/h battery on R2 and around 10%/h on R3.

  2. keep Keep WiFi connected in standby will be active if no activity is running and saves 2 perhaps 3 seconds if you pickup the remote but she still has to connect to the integration which still take a few seconds. It is at the moment only available on the R2. I did not measure battery costs here.

Ralf

7

Yeah… I turned on prevent sleep in my main activities for now. It was getting far too annoying getting error messages just trying to pump of the volume or hitting pause when needed. That 5 seconds ended up being almost 8-10 at times which I assume is due to integrations loading. Shouldn’t need to wait that long for ant remote to work. Guess I’ll see just how bad the battery life gets now.

8

I programmed a warning at 20% in my home automation. With my R2 I saw it only twice at around 11pm on a weekend. I got my R3 only a week ago and no experience yet. If it lasts a whole day with heavy usage but some breaks in the dock I can live with it.

Ralf

9

But once it goes to sleep won’t it stop reporting its battery level to your HA?

10

There are other home automations beside HA. Mini is called Symcon. Yes sleep = no report but my remote seldom sleep. Either I use the remote or she is in the dock.