One night with the R3

General
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My R3 and dock arrived yesterday and I was able to get things set up fairly quickly despite never having used anything from UC before (though I used a Harmony for years).

Our setup is fairly simply.

Sony A90J - Denon X6800H - Nvidia Shield Pro and Apple TV 4k

I was able to create activities for the Shield and ATV pretty easily. I was using the Android TV integration for the Shield, theApple TV integration for the ATV, the Denon integration for the AVR and the Home Assistant integration for the TV (I had read that it was a better choice than using the Android TV integration for the Bravia TV’s).

That was all good but the software feels more like alpha software than a polished product. I get fairly frequent network errors from the web configurator (I’m using an IP address not the mens .local lookup and that IP address is via a permanent DHCP lease for both the remote and the dock). I’ve had the remote report services were unavailable while it was just sitting on the couch and I picked it up to do something.

The Android TV media player seems fairly broken. It often has the wrong icon for the running app (or no icon at all).

I set up an IR device for the TV just to be able to get the action labelled as “Display” on the remote. That worked but only if the dock was within a few feet of the TV which is not where it will live. I put the IR blaster on and that didn’t make any difference. At about 13 feet from the TV the dock seems unable to reach the TV even with the blaster. I tried enabling the preview feature to use the remote’s emitter and assigned that to the IR TV entity and it made no difference. It’s possible I’m doing something wrong but I think I’ve got I t configured the way it should be.

I tried creating a bluetooth connection for the TV and that worked but the KEY_INFO didn’t work to trigger the “display” action. Nor did any other key, I could think to try, so I’m back to figuring out how to make IR work.

Overall, this shows a lot of promise but it needs to be a lot more reliable before I dare give it to my family to use. Telling them they have to reboot the remote three times a night isn’t going to fly. I really want this to be workable as there has been a harmony shaped hole in our family room for a while and the Sofabaton just doesn’t cut it.

August 8 followup:

Thank to the people who replied, I’ve solved a couple of problems. The IR blasters are working well now that the dock has been rebooted with them connected. A dock status section in the configurator would go a long way toward preventing this problem as it would then be obvious the docks isn’t seeing the blasters.

And, then the very need for the IR went away thanks to the pointer on using the other tv entity from home assistant that allowed the sending of arbitrary commands.

The stability last night (in limited use) was good so I’m hopeful this will prove a good solution for us!

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Regarding your challenges with the IR entity. Did you check if the IR blaster is properly detected by the dock (have a look in the web UI). It needs to be attached to the dock when it is powered off. Also did you configure the output device in the settings of the IR entity?

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If you pick up the remote and it was not in the dock or no prevent sleep activity is running the remote needs to wake up fron sleep reconnect to the wifi and all integrations. This may take some seconds. Remote Two has a Keep Wifi connected option that should be coming to the R3 soon bit UC has to wait for a new custom firmware from the wifi chip vendor for this.

This caused by most Android apps not providing these infos. Make sure to activate Chromecast in the integration setup.

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I wasn’t aware of the need to connect while powered down. The IR entity was set to the dock and all outputs.

I just tried a test with the remote’s emitter and beyond about 4 feet it isn’t strong enough to be seen by the tv. I’ll set it back to the dock and power cycle it.

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I have the activities set to not sleep. I think I have the chrome cast setting on but I will verify.

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Power cycling the dock worked. I can now take that one off my list. Thanks!

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Great. You can always check the webUI if the blaster or extenders are properly detected by the dock:

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I’m using a Sony TV and I’m not using the android tv integration at all. I got around that issue by using the sony tv integration on my home assistant and importing both the media player and the remote entities into the remote. The media player provides very basic functionality but the remote can be customized with commands for everything you need - just need to pull the available commands from home assistant logs.

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I’m using the Home Assistant integration for the tv, but it didn’t provide a way to ge the “display” command. But, thankfully, now that the IR blasters are being detected, it is working. It just wasn’t clear from the UI that I was missing anything. If the UI had told me nothing was on the ports, I’d have realized something was up. But, it just didn’t say anything specifically about the ports (other than the “default (all ports)” message so it was easy to believe it should have been working.

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You probably only added the media player entity from home assistant. For the specific commands and most stuff you need to assign to the remote buttons you need the remote entity. It lets you send manually specified commands.

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I looked through the command list. It didn’t look like the home assistant integration exposed that particular command but I will double check it.

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It is not exposed for selection. You have to chose remote send command and type the command yourself.

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Oh! Thanks! I’ll look into that. Is there a reference anywhere for the commands that are available and the format they need to be inthat you know of?

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The format is plain text, no punctuation. I don’t remember all of them but a quick google search should tell you how to pull the list. It was something like: issue a random command like test in home assistant, and then go to the home assistant system logs and it will show all available commands in the error log. The Sony ones were capitalized single strings like: Menu, Home, ActionMenu, CursonEnter, CursorUp, Return, etc.

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thanks! That’s been very helpful! I can avoid IR completely it appears. I was able to try “Display” and it worked just fine. I’ve only ever used home assistant to monitor the home theater stuff, never to control it until now so this has been uncharted territory. I appreciate your (and the others) help very much!

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You’re welcome. Between media player and remote commands I was able to build a complete device control for the TV that acts just like the stock tv remote. I come from the harmony elite world and I want to have activities and devices on separate pages. The drawback here is that I had to build the devices page as single device activities.

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As an alternative if you need it, I have directly connected my Sony to the R3 with a 3.5mm male to male stereo cable to the IR in jack. It’s as fast as the integration and very reliable. Using it for some of the commands that are not available in the integration like HDMI input and settings.

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Thanks! My dock isn’t close enough to the tv to get a cable over to it. But, good to know!

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Is this screen on the Web Configurator or the R3?

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Configurator. Perhaps on a smart phone or tablet. On my PC it looks like that:

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Ralf

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