I’ve owned the remote 2 + dock for well over a year at this point, and when I first got it, I wasn’t able to get things into a stable enough state that I’d consider unleashing it on my family. But a year later, some debugging, some help from the forums, and I think things are in a much better state, but there are also some things that are, IMHO, kinda hidden away.
So I wanted to share some tips and advice, and generally share my experience.
My devices:
- Denon AVR
- LG TV
- Playstation
- Roon streamer
- Apple TV
- Home Assistant
These devices are all connected via the AVR, and in a single room, aside from HA.
The challenges I’ve hit so far are:
- Debugging is (IMHO) MUCH easier if you have live logs - web app log viewer. This was a critical step for me (and thanks to this forum and it’s helpful folks in pointing it out).
- Activity Groups have some settings, if you are having problems, the doco here is useful: activity groups. The gotcha for me was, the Roon Integration does not support on/off. This makes the default activity group setting of “always” turn off unused entities fail. “In Off Sequence” fixed this.
- External Integrations require the beta firmware, which requires a reboot to enable. Flipping “use beta firmware” and then clicking “check for newer version” doesn’t work.
- If you are messing around adding / removing integrations (which I found necessary, perhaps due to many updates over the year since I last played with the remote), can mess up your activities. The best solution to this is the UC Remote Two Toolkit - it’s ugly as sin, but very powerful functionality, including the ability to swap entities. I wish I’d found this earlier (and again, thanks to the folks in this forum!). The UC Remote Two Toolkit also allows running activities from the web interface, which I found very useful for debugging.
I doubt I’m “done” here, but the above was enough to get me to a state that I think is workable, and my testing doesn’t show any problems.
Thank you to everyone in this forum, it’s made a world of difference. And given the forum is mostly people discussing problems, I thought I’d share something more positive. Hopefully this is helpful to someone!
