Newbie Questions (Projector, AppleTV, and Delays)

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!

OK, after more testing, I have a follow-up on my Delay item.

Tuns out the reason the delays are still running is that my activities are NOT skipping the power cycle commands. I thought they were as my projector has a dedicated Power On command and it was simply running it again with the delay but my receiver only has Power Toggle. So when I switch activities it’s actually running Projector On, Delay, then Receiver Power Toggle (and the receiver is turning off). I thought including them all in the same Activity Group would skip the power functions but apparently I’m missing something?

For your Sony projector you can use the SonyADCP integration: Community Integration - Sony Projectors (ADCP for newer models)
You should always prefer to use integrations as they are ip based. IR should only be used if there are no other options like Bluetooth. IP is also bi directional so you get feedback if your command failed and additional informations like media playback infos with cover art and the current playback position.

@kennymc.c - Thanks for that note. I haven’t gone down the IP control path yet after living with IR/Harmony for many years with no issues. I’ll need to look into your suggestion. Need to solve the first problem of getting ethernet to the projector.

On another note, I was finally able to find discrete On/Off commands for my receiver. So that’s working, but the R3 still executes the delay. The summary page on the support site suggests that it should work with IR.