Harmony 650 Remote

Since I got the new home theater set up, I’ve been struggling with the remote control situation. I have 4 devices: TV, cable box, AV receiver, and UHD Blu-ray player. The remote that came with the cable box was not adequate and did not have the 30-second skip, so I wound up getting a used remote for really cheap on Amazon. It controls 3 devices which is pretty good. And it is a JP1 remote like my old learning remotes were, but they don’t seem to make JP1 remotes anymore and most of mine don’t work, plus I don’t have a serial port on any of my computer to connect to the JP1 port. However, the Comcast remote doesn’t have nearly all the features of the JP1 remotes I had, but if you look hard enough it will still do a lot. But it won’t control 4 devices and it won’t learn commands from another remote.

I bought a neat wifi remote so I could use my old iPod as a remote. This thing has infra red emitters and learning, but it is controlled via the wifi network in the house. You use an app to control it and you can have it learn any signal from an existing remote and then create your own keypad on the screen of the iPod (or other device). So I played around with that, but the problem is you have to connect the wifi remote to power all the time and have a line of sight to the equipment it will control. Also there weren’t a lot of options that I could find on making your own remote. And it was a little clunky, sometimes not finding the emitter on the network.
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