Hi All,
I have an 8 zone, 8 device multiroom AV distribution rig and have been experimenting with remotes to control each room. Currently my best and easiest solution is cheap OneForAll remotes with some custom JP1 programming. each room has a very cheap remote with custom macros mapped to the rarely used colour buttons which send a source switch command to the matrix and then map the remote to that device. each remote has the power and audio controls configured for that TV/Sound setup as required. these configurations are saved and backed up on my computer. this is all IR, no bluetooth or wifi controls needed.
So I recently purchased a Sofabaton U2 to experiment with and compare, and for the most part it does what it needs to do very well, however there are some issues that would stop me from replacing all 8 remotes with these devices.
The App is simple, functional and quite easy to learn, however it lacks extremely important features for managing multiple rooms and multiple devices, such as the ability to save and reload configurations to copy to other remotes.
It lacks the ability to save and recall customised devices for example, I have a hidden device set up with learned IR commands for source switching on the matrix, sending IR commands to HomeAssistant for automation control, fan controllers etc. etc. that other devices use for their source switching and setup macros, as well as mapping the color buttons to things like fan on off, lights on off, air con etc.. currently to set up a second remote for another room, I would have to rebuild that functionality from scratch on each remote, for every device, this took several hours to configure the first time and I woudl have indented to have as many as 8 remotes set up for each room and 90% of their configurations are the same with the only changes to TV and Audio commands for power, volume and muting.
Mapping audio control buttons on each device is somehwat time consuming, this is a very common configuration on all universal remotes and is usually handled better than it is on the U2 remote. Currently I have to customise each of the 8 devices to set the audio controls to the commands for the AV receiver, whereas other remotes allow a global mapping for this feature across all devices which can then be overridden if required on a per device basis.
While there are only 8 main source devices in my setup, there are then 8 TVs (some are the same or similar models, but not all of them) there are some rooms with separate audio devices, some rooms have additional local devices, etc etc.. in total over 80 separate configurations and combinations to configure. some simple tweaks to the app would make this incredibly easy to setup.
Those are my main pain points at the moment for the device as it exists today, however a more advanced functionality that would make for an amazing U3 or U2 Pro upgrade would be multiroom or multiuser configuration. Where you would have a page of rooms accessable which then each contain their list of devices.
This would likely require hardware changes to add a rooms button and to support more than 15 devices but would be a huge selling point up against super high end devices from RTI and Savant that require professional configuration and have large amounts of superflous, unnecessary functionality and excessive complexity.
(edit: this took several attemps to post, as the login seems to time out too fast!)
