My new remote is setup (finally) August 2, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : remote , add a commentMy new remote is finally setup. It took me several hours, so much for being easy. To be fair though, for a person who isn’t particular about things and who just wants something to work it’s probably easier than my old remote but not by a big margin.
So it’s now setup right with the buttons all duplicated between the device page and the matching activity page. Bree can even use it! It’s still annoying though… let me count the ways.
It’s still slow. I’ve read stuff that indicates there’s a setting to make it faster but I think that’s only for the older remotes (which sent the IR command 3 times by default for some reason). I’ve tweaked all the values I can find to no avail.
Lack of macros still sucks. When I’m watching my PVR I might notice that the VCR is not displaying the time. I had a macro on my old remote that would fix this but with the Harmony remote I need to add the device to my activity (good thing it’s “always on”) so that I can map its buttons. I haven’t yet learned in the codes for other devices so that the device pages can exactly match but I seem to have the 99% of buttons mapped that I use with any frequency.
Can’t learn repeating buttons. I think I did manage once but I haven’t been able to do it again. This is something my old remote did flawlessly. The process is simple too, read the command and look for a repeating section (it may be the whole sequence or just a trailing part).
There is one good thing about everything though. Or perhaps I should say the biggest failing of the remote (activities vs macros) is mitigated by this one thing. It’s the database of IR codes. My previous remote could access an online database but I didn’t bother to buy the cable so I don’t know if this functionality is limited to the Harmony remotes or not. My remotes don’t (but the Harmony database did) have some very important codes. The codes are Power ON and Power OFF and I’ve now got them for my TV and my DVD player. The remotes don’t use these because you’d need two buttons instead of one but without these buttons it’s virtually impossible to know if the device is activated or not. My previous remote turned the TV on by pressing a number so that was ok but the Harmony doesn’t know when the DVD has been turned on by pressing the EJECT button (on the machine) which is something I do most times I go to start watching a DVD. Without the Power ON code the Harmony would turn off the player. Manual power control would have solved the problem too but it would require an extra key press to view DVDs.
My New Remote July 12, 2007
Posted by a1291762 in : remote , add a commentMy old remote (a Sunwave SRC-3000) died the other day. I found it between the couches (damn kids) and it must have been squashed because half of the screen no longer responds. It’s been an annoying few days using the original remotes but today my new remote arrived.
So the Sunwave remote was nice but being touchscreen-based it had feedback problems (ie. you can’t use it without looking at it). Mind you, the 2 remotes I had before that (same hardware, different brands) were cheap and nasty, powered by a BASIC stamp or something which made them slow, unreliable and they both broke after about 6 months. By contrast the Sunwave was fast, reliable and other than the feedback thing, perfect for me. I especially liked the configurability. It was less configurable than I originally thought (non-bitmap display so for example the text “clear” was only on 1 button) but it was nice to be able to get all the functions I actually used in an almost-logical arrangement. One of the biggest problems I had initially was caused by the touchscreen. The buttons have to be bigger (because you can’t feel them) so you can only fit half as many buttons on a screen. It compensated for this by allowing 2 pages of buttons per device but I can’t stand half-assed solutions like that. Luckily it was easy to resolve. I got all the commonly used buttons on the first page of each device with the second page used for infrequently used buttons. I did have to cheat sometimes (assigning functions to “incorrect” buttons) to make things fit, especially on my PVR which has the most buttons but it was easy enough to get used to… at least for me.
The one thing my previous Universal remotes have never managed is to achieve is acceptance from Bree. The older button-based ones weren’t very good ergonomically and didn’t come close to matching the button text with actual function. The Sunwave was much better but still had some unintuitive button assignments and the feedback problem. I’m hoping my new remote will change that.
My new remote is a Logitech Harmony 525.
Each remote I get has been more expensive than the last and the Harmony is no exception. I think the Sunwave might have had a higher RRP but I got it really cheap so it was less than the Harmony cost me. The remote itself looks really nice, nicer than any of my previous remotes, nicer even than the original remotes. The buttons seem to be laid out in a reasonable way and while the full functionality of my PVR is likely to require a bit of work to get going the other devices should be a cinch.
All of my previous Universal remotes were setup in the same way, on the remote itself. The Sunwave did have a PC-based configuration option but it required a special cable and the on-remote setup was simple enough that I couldn’t be bothered worrying about it. The Harmony is different though. There’s a setup app that wraps a browser shell, the whole app is web-based. Logitech advertises how nice it is that your data can be accessed from anywhere but it makes me uneasy. As far as I can tell there’s NO on-remote setup capability at all which means if I lose Internet connectivity or Logitech disappears I’ll be stuck… or perhaps not, there’s an effort underway to create an open implementation of the configuration stuff.
In the mean time I have to suffer with the crap web-based thing. It looks powerful… perhaps more so than what the Sunwave offered but it’s going to take me a long time to get this remote sorted out just right.
Something I noticed straight away is that there’s buttons on my PVR remote that aren’t in Logitech’s database. I went to learn them in and noticed something strange. My previous remotes all wanted me to learn by holding the button (so they could tell the difference between a press and a hold action, the repeated section isn’t always the whole sequence) but the Logitech software just tells me I held the button too long. I’m currently waiting to have access to the TV (damn wife) but I’ll definitely be pissed if the remote doesn’t handle holding buttons correctly.
Something else that’s different is that the codes, even the learned ones are on the machine so I can change buttons around more easily than on the Sunwave. The Sunwave let me move buttons on the screen but I then had to manually learn the new codes. Handling multiple devices at once (eg. TV volume, PVR channels) meant lots of manual learning but while this was more steps it was actually faster than what I’m having to go through with the Logitech setup app. Stupid.
Anyway… I’m busy trying to ensure the buttons are all mapped how I like so that when I get the TV I can actually test the remote.
Update 12 July 2007
Grrr… The big problem with the old button-based remotes was the ergonomics. I don’t know which remote the Harmony is trying to feel like but it’s not at all ergonomic for driving my PVR. That was the one thing the Sunwave got right. Sure, it’s allowable key combos meant I had to force a few things but all the buttons I needed were right under my thumb.
I think a big part of it is the positioning of the number keys. On my PVR remote they’re at the top with a few virtually unused keys above them. You spend most of your time with your fingers on the bottom half of the remote using the numbers only when programming in shows. On my Sunwave this was replicated by having the numbers on the second screen along with the other buttons I use while programming (ie. page 1 = viewing, page 2 = programming). The Harmony doesn’t give me that option though. It’s got the playback keys up near the top and the colour keys down the bottom, beneath the numbers. It would be easy to ignore the bottom half of the remote if it wasn’t for those colour keys. I’m almost tempted to use the LCD screen for the colour keys just so I can ignore the bottom half of the remote but there’s already 7 more buttons on my PVR remote than the Harmony and I’m not so sure that I’ll be able to cope with another 4 missing buttons. Also, it might not help as much as I’d like. A common operation, stopping the currently playing recording and removing it is achieved by pressing Red, Stop, Ok, Yellow, Ok. With Ok in the middle of the remote both the LCD screen buttons and the colour buttons are a stretch to reach. Sigh.
Oh and the web interface is soooooo slow plus you have to change stuff and then upload it which takes at least 30 seconds. For anything other than a major remap operation (and how many of those are you ever going to do) this remote is significantly slower to program than any of my previous ones. It only pulls ahead on big remap operations because you don’t have to re-lean a key when you move it.
And… the remote itself is slow. Not quite as slow as the old button-based ones I had but definitely slower than the Sunwave remote. It can handle fast repeating (something the old button-based ones couldn’t) but it can’t handle rapid, discrete presses (even when I change the timeouts to 0).
Update 22 July 2007
Rule number one when embedding a browser into an app… don’t disable standard functions like copy/paste!
I tried to leave feedback on the remote but the text field was too small and I couldn’t copy and paste the text in. Here’s what I was going to write.
The 525 is very slow, unable to send commands as fast as any of my regular remotes (or my previous Universal remote). It sends repeating signals fast but it cannot process individual button presses very quickly.
The lack of on-device configuration and the web-based interface means it will take me much longer to get the remote setup corectly. Even small tweaks to layout/macros take 10 times longer, require a computer and access to the internet! Unlike all of my previous remotes, the 525 has a bitmap display so there’s no reason why on-device setup can’t be guided.
Unlike device modes, which can be switched between easily, activity modes can only be switched between when executing the activity macros. The buttons must be specially setup separately to the device button layouts. Why learn twice as many button layouts? I’m just going to setup the device layouts correctly (with codes for more than one device) and use the activity buttons as macros. Decoupling macros from activity layouts would makes this less of a hassle.