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.
Here for the discussion!