Hi, I (as many here I think) bought the Haptique RS90 as a replacement for my great Logitech Harmony Elite as alas that Harmony has more and more issues to charge.
I bought the RS90 directly at the Haptique webshoip as I missed the Kickstarter (also because at that time I was not yet looking for a replacement for my still excellent working Harmony Elite).
Received the RS90 last week.
Good news:
It works. I got my LG OLED TV, Apple TV, Denon receiver and Ziggo Mediabox all working. So it is a functional replacemenrt of the Harmony.
However, I encounter some things where I wonder if I am doing something wrong or which might be suggestions for improvement of the RS90:
WebOS integration does not work at all yet for me. No clue why, but autodiscovering my LG OLED 55E9PLA does not work, and also adding it manually by IP does not do much. What could be the issue here?
Actually not a dealbreaker as plain IR works, but IP integration would of course be preferable if only for not having to point the remote in the right direction.
Macros appear to be a lot less smart than the activities on the Harmony. It works, but unless I am mistaken or do something wrong, it does not remember device state/
So if I switch from macro Watch Apple TV to Watch Ziggo Mediabox it again tries to power up my TV and receover while they are already on.
Workaround obviously is to first shutdown gthe previous macro, but switching between activities was seamless on the Harmony, not yet so with the Haptique macros.
Is this still an area where improvements are to be expected?
To me it does not make sense to have a power button in the macro UI (the top left one) that can only be assigned to one of the devices used in the macro instead of to all the involved devices.
Of course you have the power button on the top right that closes down all devices, but for me that top left power button is now rather pointless. Why would I within a macro want t switch off only one of the devices?
So I would either remove that button (or give the option to) to avoid confusion (think of my wife here that is prone to try he wrong power button) or make it possible to assign shutting down the whole macro to this button.
The pause / play button also can only be assigned to one button, which is a problem if the device uses two distinct buttons for that. It would be an improvement if you could assign a toggle like method to buttons. triggering pause if inactive and triggering play if active. Might be useful for more buttons.
In the macro UI I miss the option to get a numpad view. In the Harmony you can switch in an activity between touchpad, button and numpad view.
I especially miss this for the cable TV box as now from the macro view you can not directly go to a channel by typing in the number. You can of course by going to the device instead of the macro UI, but that is cumbersome, and somehow defeats the whole purpose of s smart remote.
The IR database of the Haptique is, sorry to say, a mess. I did manage, also with the help of this forum for the Ziggo box, to find the correct IR codes, but having to try LG codes xxxxx and Cisco codes xxxx instead of just typing the full device model like in the Harmony setup is a pain.
Luckily this mostly is a one time setup only, so overseeable, but any improvements foreseen here?
What is really annoying to me is that everytime I change a macro (for example because I forgot to assign a button) the room assignments are completerly reset again.
This is REALLY annoying. Had to reassign macros and devices to the room multiple times again that way, also unnessecary as the actual macro did not change name or so,. Just a button assignment was changed.
In general on the Harmony, setup of an activity is much smarter than on the RS90, which many more button assignments and settings directly correctly deduced from the selected devices without any user query. Most is possible on the RS90 as well, but it takes loads more work.
Which surprises me as the Harmony is more than a decade old in technology, would really have expected the RS90 to be smarter.
So in general:
The RS90 does the job and feels and looks well.
It is way less polished in details and user convenience though than the Logitech Harmony range was. So really hope improvements are still going to be made.
Would love to hear feadback and tips iif some of my impressions can be solved by something I missed.
I recognise your story. I already pointed out that Haptique should look at the ‘old’ Logitech Harmony for the ways things could really work in favor of the users. The RS90 look good but still has to grow to become a good ‘replacement’ for the ‘old’ Logitech Harmony.
I had the harmony one for years and I am really satisfied with the rs90.
I actually control everything via ir and it works just as well as with my harmony one. The android function does not work really well I think. My android (Sony Bravia) can also be controlled by ir so it’s half as wild with android.
I control for example the change of the hdmi inputs via the ‘Home Remote’ app because they are only all selectable and functional. I agree with you and you can see the team constantly working on the software. There will certainly be even more possible in the future👍
Thanks for the honest and clear review where we stand.
I personally suggest to use Smart TV to auto discovery LG WebOS. If it fails to autodetect and you enter the IP manually it means the device is not finding it on the network. I would not put a manual IP and figure out what is wrong with the network first. Let first the Smart TV get detected rest is for later.
Macros are actually smarter, they remember the last state of the device you used. But in your case we have two ways to manage a device one is via Rooms and other is via Macros. It should be the case of power off state of toggle.
The power button you see (Red) right top is for shutting down the Macro/Activity. The power you see is the device power On/Off, basically you have to swipe up to see which device UI you want to get on the touchscreen. I think most of the users are unaware about this. All screens are nothing but individual device UI so we are not modifying anything yet but we will make some changes soon.
Play/Pause is limited to one because the custom key mapping is having only PRESS function. We will bring HOLD and TOGGLE too in the next update.
ID DB is limited because we just discontinued the existing one, We already posted about this as a Topic. The good news is we are talking to Global Cache now to get their DB which is the best out there.
There is lot more going on behind the scene you will find them as updates in coming weeks.
You wrote: basically you have to swipe up to see which
device UI you want to get on the touchscreen.
Before the last update you could simply swipe from left to right to change the device. Is faster than from bottom to top and then select. Swiping up makes sense to see how many devices are ‘active’.
Many thanks for the answer. Was indeed not aware of the swiping up, that now makes more sense, thanks.
Would personally still prefer a less cluttered more customisable one screen view with buttons making sense for the activity instead of a single device, but good too know that swiping exists.
Only: in an activity I do not want to need to think of individual devices, that is the whole point of an activity. Again, Logitech nailed that. The RS90 for me does not do that yet, but has of course the big bonus of being actually still produced.
On discovering the LG TV in the Smart TV integration: not actually sure what I could try more, tried now also switching DHCP of, no difference.
Yes, it is on the same network. Yes, the TV is on. Yes, the TV has working internetconnection as all smart TV apps can stream. Autodiscovery does work for my AppleTV and Denon receiver, so yes, the Haptique app can find devices on my network,. But not my LG.
So at a loss what more to try.
And on the macros remembering state: if they do, it works really bad in operation, as itnis not properly working then on my end as I end up with devices in the wrong state if I do not power off everything on switching activity.
Is there a difference maybe also in IP integration enabled devices and devices that use IR only? As mainly my two IR based devices, the LG TV and the cable set top box, have the incorrect state issue?
But also my Denon acts weird in changing activity without shutting down first, and that is over IP integration.
Anyhow, very glad to hear on the database and other improvements in the pipeline.
Sincerely hope the RS90 can kink out the growing pains and get as mature as the Harmony platform soon to then go beyond that.
Our experience might then also vary somewhat as Logitech made quite a significant leap in functionality and usability from the One to the Elite. Used to have a One before my Elite (actually still use it upstairs as that one still does charge) and the Elite is way more powerful but also easy.
As said, the RS90 apart from some kinks does the job, it works, just not yet as streamlined as my Harmony Elite did.
Yes it was better but the issue was the slider on the Smart TV integration was not working to handle apps so we had to change this. We will now have to change the smart TV UI so it can accommodate well with slides.
With more Infrared End point coming up it will solve the issue of blasting Infrared, Missing it(because of range limitation, most important state). RS90 will require support of external Infrared blaster like Harmony has hub to do so and it always On with USB power.
On the other hand IP device states are not remembered in the Macros so we will address this in upcoming updates.
I understand what you mean. I had thought about buying the elite at the time, but the one still worked. When I wanted one, it didn’t exist anymore. At the moment everything is running through IR. Phillips Hue also via rs90. I do not use home assistant, I only have tado, heating thermostats, it would be nice to be able to control them via the rs90, currently not possible. As I said, I am really satisfied with the rs90.
I managed to revive my Harmony Elite by replacing the battery for a 15 euro one from Amazon. That actually did do the trick.
So now using my Harmony Elite again, the RS90 simply is not there yet.
Confident it might catch up sometime, so the RS90 will stay. But probably wil not use it much for now.