I have now spent another week trying to set up the R2 so that it can replace my Pronto—unfortunately without success.
The software isn’t really much further along than it was when I first tried it—when the R2 was delivered. Since I hope to receive the R3 soon, I thought I would practice with the R2.
Unfortunately, it was another big disappointment, but at least it’s better than the Neeo—but that’s not saying much.
The Pronto is still clearly superior in all configuration aspects. Looking at the development progress over the last two years, I fear that this will remain the case for a long time to come. The progress is so marginal and takes so long that I have actually lost hope of ever being able to replace my Pronto.
Unfortunately, my assessment is also confirmed by the long list of bugs and the slow pace at which they are being worked through.
What is not encouraging is the lack of any roadmap, or its maintenance.
Just a little unreliable? It feels like something suddenly isn’t working again, the user interface freezes, a strange error message appears… a feature still hasn’t been implemented, etc. Just when you think you’ve made progress, something else is missing—it’s totally frustrating.
The lack of a roadmap isn’t helpful, even if it was never adhered to anyway.
Yes, when things aren’t working correctly it can get frustrating. But remember this is a very small company. And we paid for a kickstart campaign, not a finished product.
Yes, it’s a small company.
Yes, it’s a Kickstarter campaign.
We paid for a finished product. That’s how it was advertised:
“Remote 3 is our next generation remote that can control a wide range of devices, via infrared, Bluetooth or through your local network. It even talks to your home automation hub and provides a unified interface for controlling everything in your home. Remote 3 works fully locally without subscriptions. With it you can potentially replace all your other remotes and do even more.”
For a roadmap to be perceived as a roadmap, it must include:
Goals and visions: What should be achieved?
Milestones: Important stages on the way to the goal.
Schedule: When should which steps be taken?
Resources: What resources are needed?
Dependencies: Which tasks are interdependent?
Status: Progress or current phase of the project.
I can’t find anything about it, except what would like to be achieved.
It’s great that it suits some people the way it is, and I’m happy for them. But it doesn’t suit me; maybe I’m a little spoiled by Pronto. However, one should be able to expect that current technology and modern programming environments can achieve at least what Pronto has been able to do for 20 years.
@MMinehan, have I ever said anything about missing or improvable integrations? No.
I have spoken about missing or non-functioning basic features and insufficiently stable operation, which is a fact.
Apart from that, I don’t think you are in a position to dictate to anyone in this forum what they should or should not do.
I have struggled with it as well and I had three weeks from hell. But I was fortunate to have quite a few integrations available for my devices, either directly or via Home Assistant. After some back and forth and direct discussions with developers on Discord, I managed to achieve reliable IP control for my stack 90% of the time.
The disappoint part for me so far has been the IR performance. Half of the time my screen doesn’t come down, the integrated amplifier doesn’t switch on and don’t get me started about the dCS stack. However, to be fair, I have had very little time to troubleshoot IR once the IP control was set up. I have actually acquired a Global Cache hub recently because it seems to be compatible with UC and I am hoping for a more reliable performance than UC’s own hub which so far has been a work in progress with poor IR range and frequent disconnects despite hardwired connection to my switch.
There is also the lack of a IR library and hit and miss compatibility with various IR encoding standards.
So if you primarily use IR to control your system, I completely understand and share your frustration. I continue to use my Harmony on a regular basis to control the devices UC has failed to wake up. I think the main appeal for UC comes from its IP control ability and compatibility with HA.
I agree with @Dani, not one of these items is a schedule or something where you can figure out the priority.
Also, I don’t see anything about “fix Wi-Fi, so it always stays connected”. That’s the solution to most of our issues. Sadly, that will probably kill battery life, but it’s a tradeoff. Next, they can fix battery life when Wi-Fi is always-on.
I had one of these 20 years ago and it was good (IR and RF). That said I think they stopped making them about 2010 and they were expensive. I moved from the Pronto to Harmony and was very happy with that for a long time. Then they went our of production. For me personally the UC R3 has been a superior replacement for my Harmony as all of my devices can be controlled over IP and while I admit the setup took me a while to get right the screen always works. I don’t have any lag. I don’t have freezes or strange error messages. I don’t care about the battery lasting for a week I always recharged my remotes every night and it must still be simple to use as my completely non tech savvy wife uses it happily every day. Seems everyone has different experiences based on their use cases. If you only want an IR remote just get a Sofabaton X2.
The roadmap only lists planned features and no bug fixes. Media browsing is available in the latest beta. As priority often changes to fix more important bugs the roadmap probably doesn’t show dates anymore. The did sort them by month in the beginning.
You can find most of all bug reports and feature requests on UCs feature and bug tracker on GitHub.
There is an option to keep the remote connected to WiFi in standby. If this doesn’t work for you should create a support ticket via mail or on GitHub.
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