A Harmony remote for the TV,DVD,VCR,receiver in the family room.
(I hesitate to call it home theatre, because.. well because I don't think the screen is big enough nor the system loud enough.)
The Harmony Remote was designed by a Canadian company but they were recently bought up by Logitech.
This thing is the coolest. I've heard nothnig but good about the whole concept.
To program it, you hook it up the USB port of your computer and go to their website. On the site, there's a wizard that you pick all of your devices, by model number, and select the actions that you want to use. Then it all gets downloaded to your remote.
Done.
It has action buttons like:
"Watch a DVD"
"Watch TV"
When you press those, you can have all sorts of things happen:
of course all of the right components get powereed up and set to the right settings, but you can also send controls to your home automation system to dim the lights, etc...
If it can't put together a sequence of commands on it's own, you can program it in RAW mode by pointing the original remotes at it and hitting the buttons in the sequence required to do what you want. It remembers the sequence and stores it.
I'm going to be able to put away 6 remotes and just have one.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/features/harmony/ca/en,CRID=2078
I got the 680 model.
(I hesitate to call it home theatre, because.. well because I don't think the screen is big enough nor the system loud enough.)
The Harmony Remote was designed by a Canadian company but they were recently bought up by Logitech.
This thing is the coolest. I've heard nothnig but good about the whole concept.
To program it, you hook it up the USB port of your computer and go to their website. On the site, there's a wizard that you pick all of your devices, by model number, and select the actions that you want to use. Then it all gets downloaded to your remote.
Done.
It has action buttons like:
"Watch a DVD"
"Watch TV"
When you press those, you can have all sorts of things happen:
of course all of the right components get powereed up and set to the right settings, but you can also send controls to your home automation system to dim the lights, etc...
If it can't put together a sequence of commands on it's own, you can program it in RAW mode by pointing the original remotes at it and hitting the buttons in the sequence required to do what you want. It remembers the sequence and stores it.
I'm going to be able to put away 6 remotes and just have one.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/features/harmony/ca/en,CRID=2078
I got the 680 model.
[smilie=e:
