I have the R2 and after some initial effort when it first came out I now have it as my daily remote and I’m quite pleased with it. I even got it to talk to Home Assistant and do some of my home automation tasks.
I ordered the R3 mainly as a backup but I’m reading about some of the new features it will have vs R2. So my question is will I be able to configure and use the R3 while the R2 is still fully configured and operating. Will the Web Configurator be able to link into either the R2 or the R3. I would expect so but just wanted to ask.
As the remote is running the web configurator locally there is no official way to link two remotes. It’s only possible with multiple docks and a single remote.
But there are users that have multiple remote and sync their settings via backups and the unofficial UC Remote toolkit (GitHub - albaintor/UC-Remote-Two-Toolkit)
I didn’t mean to link the two remotes together. Since R2 would have one local IP address and R3 would have a different IP address, couldn’t whatever browser you’re using talk to R2 (only R2) and then at a different time talk to R3 (only R3).
Also the hubs for R2 and R3 would have different IP addresses so couldn’t they both exist on the local network and talk with their respective Rs without interfering with each other?
I have 2 R2 with 2 Docks and both R2 have the same configuration and use the same docks. I do not only use both remotes with the same configuration. With the help of some home automation software I synchronize also the started activities on both remotes. This means if I start an activity on 1st remote it is also started on 2nd remote. Only drawback for now is that the start page of the activity is not automatically shown on 2nd remote. I can start an activity in my home cinema from the basement, go up into my cinema and grep the 2nd remote and everything is already running.
If you prefer to have two really separate things it should be easy.
For the docks it might be a good idea to have both docks configured for both remotes because they are only (more or less) dumb IR transmitter and can be used so that both remotes can control IR devices in 2 different rooms.
Actually, I really don’t need to run both
R2 and R3 at the same time. I might want to program R3 a little differently than R2 to take advantage of some new features. So I would want to leave R2 alone and continue it being my daily remote. But while it’s active I just wanted to make sure as I’m working on R3 that they don’t interfere with each other.
There is no possibility of the R2 and the R3 being used as remotes at the same time.
I do have another question! Since my R2 is working quite nicely I would want all of its current functions to be the starting point in R3. Can I make a backup with R2 and then restore the backup to R3? Or will I basically have to start from scratch with R3?
As Remote 3 has not been released yet, nobody besides UC can confirm this yet. But as the software has been advertised to be compatible I guess you would be able to restore a R2 backup on the R3.
You could try this with the core-simulator which can be configured to act as a R3 although it can’t run custom integrations and only includes a dummy ir database.
I know R3 isn’t coming out until early next year, but I was just wondering how much work it may be to transition over from R2 to R3. We shall see what we shall see!
As @kennymc.c wrote almost nobody knows. Because there are slight differences between R2 and R3 I would guess that >95% will work but some additional work is needed. Especially the differences in button mapping might need a bit of work.