When we have too many electronic devices in our living room, universal remote might be a good idea. One universal remote can replace multiple remotes, so we don’t have to keep changing remote when we watch something.
After a bit of search, I decided to try Logitech Harmony 300i as my first universal remote control. It can replace up to 4 remotes, and I suppose that should be enough for my living room.
Setting up process is easy. We only need to attach the mini-USB cable to connect between Harmony 300i and a computer. The Logitech software will guide us to choose the device remote we want to replace. I can easily find my TV in Logitech’s massive list of supported remote. Even if we have an unsupported device, we can teach this remote to learn a custom remote as long as we still have the original remote.
One thing I notice from using a universal remote, the response time between pressing a button and a response from our device is slightly longer. This shouldn’t be an issue for common tasks like power on/off or volume up/down, but can be an issue when we need to use our remote to choose something from a long list.
Another problem is, when a universal remote doesn’t have a button with exactly similar name as our remote, we can actually assign any unused button in the universal remote. While this concept sounds good in theory, I kept forgetting which button does what function when using this custom assignment. Ah well, I shall try a bit longer, perhaps after a while I will get used to it.
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