[TriLUG] OT: Logitech Harmony Remotes

[Aaron Schrab]

At 17:59 -0400 06 Sep 2013, Bill Farrow <bill at arrowsreach.com> wrote:
>I have set one up for a friend who also wanted to bury his equipment
>inside a cabinet. His Logitech Harmony remote was programmed via a USB
>and required a Windows Application which was awful to use.  The
>application was a poor attempt at creating a simple user interface.

The setup program is also available for OS X, but I agree that it's 
pretty bad on either supported platform.  Fortunately, I don't need to 
use it often.

>In the end I hated it.

Other than the setup program, I love them.  I've bought a couple for 
myself, and helped family members setup others.  In my experience they 
work great.  Ideally they'd offer a bit more flexibility, but my ideals 
on that are probably unrealistically high.

>You press a button on the remote to "watch TV"
>and the remote would play a sequence of commands via IR Blasters to
>each piece of equipment that needs to be set up.  Sometimes it would
>work, sometimes something would go wrong and something wouldn't turn
>on.  At this point you are screwed, since the Harmony now assumes that
>everything is on and running fine. Your only option is to hit the
>"power off" button and hope it works so you can try again.

For the ones that I've used in that situation I press the "help" button.  
It will then resend any commands which are idempotent, which is pretty 
much every command needed to switch to any activity in my setup; so this 
almost always fixes things for me in the rare cases where there's a 
problem.  After that the display asks if things are fixed, and if not it 
will then go through a series of questions about what isn't in the 
expected state, and when it gets there it will resend the commands to 
get things back in order.  I don't know how this would work with the 
remote linked to in the original message, since that doesn't appear to 
have a display.