Long time Harmony user here who jumped on the R3 hoping that it’s the solution I need for my home theater. Admittedly, I’m not a power user and my use case is pretty simple, but I apologize for what are likely easy questions as I learn my way around here.
First of all, I have my Onkyo Receiver, AppleTV, and Panasonic UHD Player in a media closet. My Sony VPL-VW695 Projector is in the theater.
My big three questions at the moment are:
Projector: I set up the receiver and UHD player with no issues using the “generic” IR integrations in the web interface. When I did the same with the Sony Projector…nothing. I ended up learning each of the commands form the Harmony and that’s working, just thought it was odd that Sony (one of the main home theater projectors) wouldn’t work. I can easily live with the learned commands I’m using but is there a trick to get the full command set working?
Delay: This one is driving me crazy. My projector takes a bit to warm up so I have a 20000ms delay built into the startup sequence before it starts selecting the inputs and settings. Works great. But when I switch activities, the delay still triggers. I have all the components in the same activity group. I’ve tried both “Previous command skipped (default)” and “Between Skipped Commands” and the delay still runs. The activities switch as they should between AppleTV and the UHD Player, it’s just that the delay runs every time. I’ve moved the delay around to no success. Current setup is Projector On, Delay, Receiver On, AppleTV On, change inputs/settings and then same flow but with the UHD instead of hte AppleTV. While it works great switching between the activities (it doesn’t try to power on the projector and receiver again) the delay still triggers. Any hints as to what needs to be done here to skip the delay when switching?
AppleTV: I know this is a very dumb question but it appears the AppleTV can be set-up as either a standard IR device or as an Integration. What are the pros/cons of each? Right now I have it as an integration and it’s working but I also had it freeze up once (device ran the startup activity but none of the AppleTV controls worked) and I had to re-run the integration set-up to get the AppleTV back. Is IR the “safer” way of doing this? What functionality do I lose by going IR? Lastly, I do use HomeKit to run my smart home (lights, thermostats, etc)…it’s not clear to me how to add those controls to the R3.
Apologies again for the dumb questions. This is VERY different than the Harmony and I’m trying to work my way through this!