After months of anticipation, I’ve received the Remote 3. I now need to re-learn years and years of muscle-memory (trauma) from my Harmony Remote.
After my initial setup I have the following questions:
Activity Pages - can they have background wallpapers ?
Activity Pages - Is there a way to have Light / Blind buttons similar to the ones on the “Home pages” ?
Home assistant Blind integration - Is there a way to set the cover position ? (some blinds have both a position percentage and a cover percentage)
Long press duration - is there a way to change the long press duration down from 800ms ? I’m used to long pressing OK on the Youtube app for the context menu and 800 ms is far to long to press the button
Slider - Is the slider below the screen working ? If so, in what situations ?
Default button actions (like Back and Home) - is there a way to assign those actions to other buttons?
Pages - is there a way for the physical buttons to still work with the activity if the user changes page ? It can become confusing compared to the Harmony
Pages - is there a way to link from one page to another ? What about to specific activity pages ?
Pages - is there a way to decrease the heading size (where the page name is) or to change the grid size?
Fix activity - Do I get it correctly that this is still not working ?
Is there a way to disable editing directly on the remote?
Background only for the heading of an activity. I made pictures of my different rooms and uploaded them for this purpose to the remote.
Light and Blinds not yet in activities I think.
Slider is at the start intended for volume control. More in preparation.
If you close the activity (top right cross, not stop) the button mapping is for home not for activity.
No link on a page to get to other pages. Swiping left right will change pages. On the top you can open a menu to get to the included entities.
Heading is fixed. Grid size can be changed with the grid symbol on the right when you edit an activity GUI.
If you have several activities for one room like TV+STB and TV+ATV put them in the same activity group this way the TV will not be switched on/off if you switch activity. I never needed something like fix activity.
Regarding grid size, that’s only for Activity Pages, right ? The “standard pages” (not sure what they are called) have a fixed grid if I’m getting it right.
Regarding the blind cover integration, found the answer to my question here - “Tilt features are planned, but not yet supported.”
TBH, my main gripe now is the long press duration and not being able to figure out if there is a way to change it.
On the “home page” is there a way to disable the automatic showing of the media playing on the running activity ?
Yes, you can deactivate this feature on the remote itself if you tap on your profile icon on the top right, go to settings/user interface and deactivate activites on pages
Home assistant Blind integration - Is there a way to set the cover position ? (some blinds have both a position percentage and a cover percentage)
Yes, you can use the “set position” command in macros and activities if it’s a cover entity which should be the case if it’s comming from HA
Default button actions (like Back and Home) - is there a way to assign those actions to other buttons?
No, but e.g. if you map something to short press home, long press home will automatically be used for the remote ui home command and vice versa
Pages - is there a way for the physical buttons to still work with the activity if the user changes page ? It can become confusing compared to the Harmony
There’s no user mapping function but some buttons like volume are automatically mapped to the currrently running media player entitiy so you could at least controll the volume while you’re outside of the running activity
Pages - is there a way to link from one page to another ? What about to specific activity pages ?
Fix activity - Do I get it correctly that this is still not working ?
Yes, it actually never worked but you can at least access all included entities from there.
Third-party apps like the U Remote Control app for Apple devices allow you to run the start or stop sequence anytime
Is there a way to disable editing directly on the remote?
You can create a restriced user profile that has no access to settings and configuration
Media playing - is it possible to do this per page or to have it on the activity pages but not the home page ? Edit: Seems like it can be activated for activity pages and disabled for the home page(s). Just no way to specify which ones.
Blind integration - that’s what I did already, thanks!
Jump to page - At least I’m not the only one looking for this
Media playing - is it possible to do this per page or to have it on the activity pages but not the home page ? Edit: Seems like it can be activated for activity pages and disabled for the home page(s). Just no way to specify which ones.
You can add a media widget to the user interface of an activity page
Hope it’s OK if I drop a few extra questions here. I think a lot new Remote 3 owners will look at this thread and learn a few things.
I seem to be having some issues keeping the remote charged. It seems to charge extremely slow overnight on the dock (last night it charged to around 40%), is this normal behaviour ? How many Amps should the dock charger have ?
When picking up the remote after a few minutes of no use, I get a red “service unavailable” (and I think “integration unavailable”, and once or twice “Not connected to dock” or similar), after 1 or 2 seconds everything works correctly. Both the remote and the dock have fixed IP addresses. I can’t increase the sleep timeout, or have the activity keeping the remote on because the remote is not charging enough overnight
Infrared - compared to the harmony (without any additional emitters) it seems very weak. I added the larger emitter that comes with the dock as the dock itself below my TV wasn’t able to turn it on. But I still haven’t found a way for it to reach the Amplifier (and I don’t want to have infrared emitter cables everywhere). For reference, the harmony dock was able to reach both devices from the same position as the new dock.
I seem to be having some issues keeping the remote charged. It seems to charge extremely slow overnight on the dock (last night it charged to around 40%), is this normal behaviour ? How many Amps should the dock charger have ?
My Remote Two takes around 5 hours to charge from 0% to 100%. Both models have the same battery but the dock charging process may be different for Remote 3. But 40% in one night seems to be very slow.
When picking up the remote after a few minutes of no use, I get a red “service unavailable” (and I think “integration unavailable”, and once or twice “Not connected to dock” or similar), after 1 or 2 seconds everything works correctly. Both the remote and the dock have fixed IP addresses. I can’t increase the sleep timeout, or have the activity keeping the remote on because the remote is not charging enough overnight
This is the normal behaviour. When the remote enters stanby mode all integrations and docks disconnect and have to reconnect once the remote wakes up.
You can try to activate the “Keep WiFi connected in standby” option under the power savings settings on the remote ui (not the configurator). This will activate Wake-on-LAN on the remote. With this the remote can skip all ip releated handshakes after waking up and only needs to reconnect to the integrations and docks.
Still not the same as prevent sleep but way less energy consumption. The only downside of this are the random display activations mentioned in the know bugs of the beta update release notes.
nfrared - compared to the harmony (without any additional emitters) it seems very weak. I added the larger emitter that comes with the dock as the dock itself below my TV wasn’t able to turn it on. But I still haven’t found a way for it to reach the Amplifier (and I don’t want to have infrared emitter cables everywhere). For reference, the harmony dock was able to reach both devices from the same position as the new dock.
In my experience the new Dock 3 alone is not enough but together with the blaster that sits next to the dock i’m able to reach the same devices as the Harmony Hub. The blaster seems to have a more omni directional beam than the dock.
But if you placed the dock below the TV it should work. That seems strange. What codes are you using? I would only use IR if no IP integration is available and Bluetooth can’t be used either
I can’t find this option on the remote. Maybe it was removed from the 3 ? This would probably be the solution to this annoyance.
You’re right. UC has removed this option from the R3 due to the mentioned bug but not on the R2. They waiting on a fix from a 3rd party that develops the wifi chip firmware.
The minimum power requirements are written on the bottom of the dock, but it’s also listed on our website, as well as included in the booklets that were in the package
After a week of use, I’m still a bit jarred by the following issues, is there any plan to fix/mend/go around them ?
I’m constantly hit by “Unable to connect to dock”, “Service unavailable” and similar messaged for random amounts of time after trying to wake up the remote from sleep. This is something I never faced in any other remote. Trying to pause or mute when the remote is sleeping is a painful experience. Keeping the remote awake kills the battery far too quickly. Would the"Keep wifi on standby" option solve this ? Will it be made available again ?
Long press duration - trying to use contextual menus on Android is a pain (long press on youtube for example). I’ve set a different key for this, but there clearly should be a way to define this value (if possible by key, if not, per activity)
Key Repetition Rate - Compared to the Harmony remote or even my denon remote via CEC, quickly advancing a video is a slow and painful experience on both AndroidTV and Apple TV. Not really sure why, but this clearly should be fixed/configurable.
Infrared - is the dock sending the infrared at full strength ? I find it hard to believe it’s that much worse than the harmony dock, even when used with external emitters.
Small issues:
Can’t get the slider to work on any activity - I’m probably doing something wrong/stupid
The remote gets quite warm if kept on
Some buttons have confirmation screens, some don’t. I would like to be able to configure this.
Dock problem might be WiFi related do you use Unifi? With my R2 I have a simple mesh setup and fixed IPs defined in my router. Hoping between to APs might also result in an interruption. I hardly use IR up to now I was not affected with connection problems.
For certain functions there are special commands like CONTEXT_MENU or CURSOR_ENTER_LONG (Android TV) to get to a context menu. For IR you can use IR command with a delay or IR sequence with a repeat value. Long press with IP is not so easy like IR from the Harmony.
Slider is currently only used for volume of certain entities. I do not have my R3 yet so I cannot tell which. My R2 says it might work with Denon, Marantz, Android TV with chrome cast features activated, LG TV, Enigma2 STBs, Samsung TV, Sonos, Apple TV, Kodi. All IP integrations.
