Initial smartremote hardware feedback

I've finally had some time and energy to get our smartremote into a state where we can start using it (also prompted by our Harmony getting more and more flaky). There are things I really like about it - the screen for instance - but other aspects of the hardware design don't feel quite as good. The major thing that's struck me so far is that compared with the Harmony it's difficult to use the hard buttons of the smartremote without looking at them. I'm sure it'll get easier with practice but the fact that apart from the D-pad all the buttons are flat, level with each other and butt right up against each other makes them hard to tell apart. There just two 'pimples' (on the power and play/pause buttons) to locate yourself with, otherwise everything just feels the same. Thinking about a smartremote 2 it might be helpful to somewhat emulate the Harmony layout - separate out the buttons into three columns maybe, and have the edges of the buttons detectable by feel. And definitely don't put the main power button right next to mute!

Overall I like it and I'm still glad I bought it and I'm starting to configure things to our needs. But tweaked just a little the hardware could be perfect.

Andrew

Agreed about the buttons, but I've gotten used to it and at least in my case it did get easier. I do still struggle occasionally with differentiating the back and home buttons from the volume and channel buttons with the room lights turned off but the backlight has helped with that immensely.

I've developed some strategies to deal with the power button. I find it helps to use separate macros for power on and off tied to short and long presses respectively. With my power on macro I use conditionals for each command so if I accidentally short press the power button (i.e. power on) when the system is already powered up it simply skips each command in the macro and does nothing. I find this extremely helpful to keep devices that don't have discrete power commands from powering off accidentally.

I don't really have issues with accidentally pressing power off since it requires a long press for me but my wife has accidentally powered things down a few times now. I'm kicking around the idea of adding an overlay that pops up on the screen when you long press the power button basically asking "Are you sure?" just for added peace of mind.

Nillaz wrote:

Agreed about the buttons, but I've gotten used to it and at least in my case it did get easier. I do still struggle occasionally with differentiating the back and home buttons from the volume and channel buttons with the room lights turned off but the backlight has helped with that immensely.

I've developed some strategies to deal with the power button. I find it helps to use separate macros for power on and off tied to short and long presses respectively. With my power on macro I use conditionals for each command so if I accidentally short press the power button (i.e. power on) when the system is already powered up it simply skips each command in the macro and does nothing. I find this extremely helpful to keep devices that don't have discrete power commands from powering off accidentally.

I don't really have issues with accidentally pressing power off since it requires a long press for me but my wife has accidentally powered things down a few times now. I'm kicking around the idea of adding an overlay that pops up on the screen when you long press the power button basically asking "Are you sure?" just for added peace of mind.

Yes I've already changed the power down to only be triggered by a long press of the power button. I think that's enough but if it is a problem then adding a confirmation popup is a good idea.

Andrew

I solved this by co-opting the power button to do other things. I have a separate scene with all of my device on/off buttons, that way they do not get accidently pushed.

The short press on the power button simply changes my AV input to the appropriate input based in the current scene. Long press brings up my room light control page.

On my On/Off scene, the power button will control the power to my devices, as a group.

I do something very similiar. My wife would hold the power button down too long to turn on the HT, the long press was "turn off". Then I got, "this damn thing didn't work again".

Long or Short press brings up a power scene with a green block (Turn On) and a red block (Turn Off).

I wish there was a way to adjust the time delay for the long press. If we could I could make it longer, I would go back to the Press On, Hold for Off model.

There is a way to adjust the long press timing in the javascript. Just keep in mind that each template update will overwrite those changes. If we think we want people to mess with that, I will post that update some time in the future.

BTW, I too don't like the power button default behavior.  Something to be looked at in the future.