Universal Remotes

NOTE: This is an update to an article from Urithi Magazine, originally written in 2017.

“A universal remote is a remote control that can be programmed to operate various brands of one or more types of consumer electronics devices.” – Wikipedia.

I’ve had various encounters with universal remotes. The most interesting ones came with a huge booklet filled with various brands and codes. So, you would toggle a switch on your universal remote to “TV”, then look for your brand of TV in the booklet, where you’d see anywhere from 3 to 8 5-digit codes, e.g. 00121, 19200, 00120. You would then enter the code on the remote, and press another button to “store” the setting. Then you press the power button and see if your TV turns off and on. If it doesn’t then you start again! You could spend the whole day doing this.

But with time comes progress. I’m going to talk about the Logitech Universal Remote, specifically the one I currently own – the Logitech Harmony 900. It supports up to 15 devices, and currently I use it to control:

1. AV Receiver (see this article)
2. TV
3. Blu-ray Player
4. DSTV Explora
5. Media Player (I’ll also write an article on this)
6. Playstation
7. Amazon Fire TV

I’ve owned several Logitech remotes (including the 350, 650 and One+). Logitech makes it so easy to program that your mother (I think…) could do it. There is a web application http://myharmony.com/ which works by letting you add all the devices you want to control. And with a database of 270,000 devices, you’re unlikely to have a problem finding the device in Logitech’s list.

After adding your devices, the next step is to create what are called “Activities”. I have some basic activities like “Watch TV”, “Watch DVD”, “Listen to Music”, etc. For each of these activities, you follow a step-by-step guide that asks you which devices are used for the activity and what they do (e.g. for me, Watch TV means “watch DSTV”, so I uses the TV to display pictures, the decoder to change channels, and the AV Receiver to control volume). Then the application creates default settings for all your devices to correctly power them on/off for you.

After setting up all your activities, you plug the remote into your laptop using the provided USB cable and click on the “Sync” button to save the remote activities to your remote.

An example

Let me explain very briefly what happens when I press “Watch TV” on the remote’s touch screen:

1. The TV is switched on
2. The AV Receiver is switched to the “DSTV” input
3. The DSTV decoder is switched on

As soon as all the above is done, the screen on the remote changes to show your favourite DSTV channels:

My kids recently edited the screen and pushed all my Sports and news channels down the list in favour of their cartoon channels! However, you can have multiple pages of your favourite channels and use the remote’s touch screen to scroll between the different pages.

But the killer feature of the Logitech remote is it’s Help system. Sometimes, especially when my younger son is using the remote, he points it at the sky and one of the devices doesn’t come on. Luckily, he can read, so I’ve taught him to look at the devices and he can quickly identify which one has the problem. So, when he presses “Help” the Logitech remote will ask questions on the display to help identify the problem.

By answering the Yes/No questions, my son no longer has to wake me up from my Saturday morning slumber if there’s a problem!

Conclusion

Logitech are by far the best providers of universal remotes. They have various options from as low as $35 for the Harmony 350, to the Harmony Elite for $349 – which can control WiFi and Bluetooth connected devices.

However, there are other options such as URC, Phillips Pronto (which I believe has been discontinued), Neeo and other Chinese brands that are not really universal but are meant to be cheap replacements for your remote that your daughter threw in the toilet, or your dog ate.