Coming from the Harmony world one issue that I find irrittating is waiting for the R3 to wake up and reconnect to the various integrations. My familiy is constantly telling me the remote is displaying the red ‘service unreachable’ message to which I have to remind them to wait a sec. But very annoying for them if they need to quickly pause or mute for example.
One solution is to prevent the remote from sleeping in the activities menu. But doing so the remote barely lasts a day. And if someone forgets to put is back in the dock overnight then the remote is dead in the morning…grrrrr!
So I aquired a wireless Qi charger stand (10000mAh) and put it on the side table. Not the best looking but does the job. We have no power points nearby. Now we can ‘dock’ the remote on the Qi charger and reduce the likelyhood of the remote going flat.
If you do have a power point near your side table you can also undermount wirelss qi chargers that work through wood and tiles up to 20mm thick. So your side table becomes a charging surface.
Could be a great opportunity for Unfolded to make a good looking battery dock for the remote. You could easily use a 10,000 to 20,000 mAh battery and get up to a week of use.
Good idea, but question to me is, what will happen with the R3 battery in a year, if it is always powered up to the limit? The housing doesn’t look like, that it is easy to exchange the battery.
I can confirm, the poor battery life is the worst thing of the R3.
Batteries are better then a lot of people say/write. I have a PHEV car for 5 years now and it is normally everday charged from 20-100% and I do not see any regression. Same with my smart phones I always charged them to 100% and never had a defect battery in the last 15 years. On discord Lutz wrote that they are planning a replacement kit as soon as kickstarter is fulfilled.
Harmony Elite was not so much better hardly made a weekend with less features. In the last 20 month I only got a 20% warning from my homeautomation 2 times and I use the remotes a lot.
Towards the end, my harmony was lasting a few hours but when it was new, it could last almost a week with normal use.
The battery on the R3 needs revision or the software needs adjustments as it’s a major weakness. I’ve switched off the sleep stopping in the activities. Will see how long it can last now.
