I was thinking about why people keep saying they want the brains of the remote in a hub like Harmony, and I think they’re wrong.
In fact, I know they’re wrong because both the Unfolded Circle Remote and the Harmony Hub are Wi-Fi. It’s actually better to have one less wireless hop in the chain.
So what is it then?
Battery life
Tonight, I was thinking about why the remote has such poor battery life even when sitting idle (no running activity).
This is me just going off on a limb, but if the remote’s processing is what kills the battery, then it’s possible that’s the issue with battery life and why my 12-year-old Harmony remotes still last more than a day without needing a charge.
That’s gotta be it. You can move most of the logic into Home Assistant to achieve a “hub-like” scenario, but that doesn’t fix the battery-life issue.
Wi-Fi Connection (or lack thereof)
Honestly though, my biggest issue with the remote isn’t the battery but the inability for it to stay connected to Wi-Fi. Causes so many problems. The Harmony remote stays connected to the hub all the time, and I think it’s using either a direct Wi-Fi connection or Bluetooth.
Harmony is a bad example to compare with. Communication with Hub is done by a non standard RF protocol with quite limited range comparable to their mouse and keyboard.
The Harmony couldn’t do all the thing you can do with the UC remotes like media browsing. Even if the processing would be done on a non battery powered device the remote itself would still need to run some sort of ui that can do all of this and a constant connection to the brain to get real time updates. I don’t think you would get the same battery life than a Harmony with it because it was just a one way connection. The responsiveness would also be worse with this approach. I definitely noticed a difference between a Harmony and a UC remote.
Maybe… and I hope I dont open a big can of worms here, it would be better to have the hub connect to your network via Wifi or ethernet - when the latter is available, and the remote connect to the hub via BLE or even a non-standard protocol…
I’d also agree that the remote (being a non-mains powered device) should be as dumb as possible (for example, sending a command like button X pressed) and the hub holds all activities, state, etc…
I’m actually quite surprised they didnt engineer it this way tbh…
That’s what I’m thinking too. It need to be a connection with sufficient bandwidth for video playback, media navigation, etc, but the guts that need to stay connected and use battery are all in another device like Hub device.
Not easy to do. But it would give incredible Battery life right?
Apparently BLE5 can go “up to” 2mbps… enough for small videos for sure… but yeah, its a top up re-think and re-construction…
(In my specific case so far I’ve had decent/good battery life, and quick response time. havent noticed wifi being an issue except for when trying to use the webconfigurator). But yeah, going fwd this architecture seems to make much more sense. I hope others will contribute with reasons why this wouldnt be good Here for the discussion!
Of course it’s better in the hub/dock from multiple perspectives (and battery life wouldn’t be at the top of my list because there are multiple drivers of battery life).
And, that’s pretty common in the CI space (URC TC, Control4, Savant, etc). But, it’s expensive and that’s why you don’t see it in the prosumer/consumer space much. Not just UC, but AVA, Sofabaton, and Cantata aren’t usng this model because of the cost of going that route into a market segment where cost is already a barrier to entry.
If you want this workflow in the prosumer/consumer market, your options are to use an R2 or R3 as a front end for HA or the Astrion as a front end for HA.
No one is going to build it except as a front end to something like HA and UC has already done that.
Sawtaytoes, to fully grasp the concept think of the “remote” as a box connected with a Ethernet cable to your network. Like the Harmony hub but connected by cable, not by WiFi.
The last product released by Logitech under the Harmony brand, which is what I have, the 2400 Pro, had such a hub powered by PoE and it has never, ever, not even once, dropped a connection or missed a command.
That is the first and the most important advantage. Since the server runs on a box hard wired to your network, the server will always stay connected, no matter what your WiFi is doing. No timeouts, no disconnections. This box, the server, can then be controlled wirelessly by a handset (a remote), an app, computer etc. It can directly power IR blasters. It can run serial interfaces. It can integrate Zigby and whatever else you may wish for. It can be modular and have add-on hardware.
This is the installer level stuff which yes, is expensive, but it’s expensive for a reason: it is reliable.
Yep! For me, the Harmony Pro 2400 Hub equivalent is Home Assistant.
Where the Harmony Pro 2400 remote is the Unfolded Circle Remote 3.
But without integrations on the remote itself, you lose some features such as pre-defined button layouts for devices and some other features.
Sadly, if the Remote 3 can’t access Wi-Fi, it doesn’t matter if I use IR, IP, or Home Assistant. It simply can’t connect to anything; therefore, it can’t do any actions no matter what’s on Ethernet.
I think the most important piece to the Remote 3 is keeping it connected to Wi-Fi. But if they developed it differently, it might be able to use another protocol for commands (Zigbee, Z-Wave, IR, Bluetooth, etc) and be less reliant on Wi-Fi as the only mode of communication.
I don’t need to see cover art for media that is currently playing on my remote’s screen. I would trade that every time for an ergonomic remote that fits comfortably in hand, with critical navigation and volume buttons I can identify blind by feel, that is immediately responsive without having to shake it awake and wait a few seconds, that doesn’t fully drain the battery in the time it takes to watch 1-2 movies.
I want to love the UC Remote3/Dock3. But it does literally none of these things. My Harmony Elite is still an order of magnitude (at least) better for day to day use.
That’s because if UC would have had a dedicated server like C4, the handset would have just been a controller. And the odd handset disconnect would have not affected the server / activity. Maybe just the odd delay in sending a command.
Because the WiFi connection is unreliable with both docks and remote. I sorted the docks out by hardwiring them to my switch. But there is very little that can be done about the poor radio performance of the remote itself. I personally would have gladly paid the difference for running the server on one of the docks, hardwired to my network.
Bug fixes and WiFi take priority and consume most of our time.
It’s the main reason that planned features like media browsing, OAuth support, Spotify integration, Dock features, etc. are late
They’re focused on actually fixing the Wi-Fi issues! That’s FANTASTIC! I thought they were focused on feature work, but it looks like this is more important to them! Woohoo!!!
At the same time we have to keep everyone occupied.
They have multiple people working on things, so while one person or a group might be dealing with this Wi-Fi issue, other folks are working on other things.
Many issues we are dealing with are not simply logical bugs that just need to be found and fixed, but depend on support from hardware manufacturers. For example the closed sourced WiFi controller firmware. Unfortunately, this has been a very slow process over the last year to get issues confirmed and fixed.
That sucks. Depending on manufacturers when it causes tons of issues .
They did get some things fixed in the past though.
Overall, it sounds like they chose a poor manufacturer for their Wi-Fi chip. My personal opinion, but it could be completely wrong.
The Harmony Pro 2400 has a 2.4” super low resolution screen and used RF. While amazing for distance, the bandwidth is super limited for RF. As far as BLE 5 being 2Mbps, that works out to be 200KB/s, not sure if that’s enough bandwidth for a higher resolution screen. Not to mention distance and interference since every device has Bluetooth in it these days.
I’m trying to think of a wireless protocol that would have the bandwidth to keep the high resolution screen and all I can think of is WiFi direct.. Maybe a 200KB/s BLE connection is enough but I see potential issues. RF wouldn’t work without a much lower resolution screen.
Now, if you want to take out the high resolution screen and have a remote that’s almost all physical buttons it would probably work but may be more expensive due to reasons others have mentioned like C4 and other higher end systems.
Personally I want the high resolution screen and I know opinions on that are going to vary but I honestly think they can get the WiFi issues worked out. It took Google and Apple years of tweaking everything to make batteries in smart phones last as long as they do and all those tips and tricks maybe hidden away behind proprietary code. They “may" be able to look at AOSP and get some tips but while Android runs the Linux kernel, it’s not really Linux like the unfolded remote so that may not work.
I can see a lot of benefits of moving the brains to the dock but the one issue is transmitting higher resolution output to the remote. If there is a better method than direct Wi-Fi that may work but BLE and RF isn’t going to work without basically reducing the screens size and resolution.
The basic functionality and integration is for my point of view much better than Logitech Harmony, but I also would like to see the brain in the (POE powered) dock. This would also allow to use different remotes (I like the Remote 3, but others find it to slippery and it is very easy to inadvertently touch a button.
Here for the discussion!
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