Harmony Hub Setup, the SMART Universal Remote

Hey everybody welcome to tech with Bret, where I help tech at work for you. If this is your first time here on my channel and you love learning about all kinds of smart home products that will change your life, make sure you hit the subscribe button below because that’s what this channel is all about. So today, we’re gon na solve a big problem that I’ve had for a long time is having too many remotes in the main entertainment room. That’S this room right here over on the TV we have a receiver set up. We got that big samsung TV. We have a fire TV dongle and then we have a Android TV and even a Wii. U, and if anyone tries to use this TV, they have no idea what to do, because I have way too many remotes, but we’re gon na solve that using the Logitech Harmony, smart control. So this has a hub that will allow you to control all kinds of devices, just by sending out infrared signals to your other devices as well as using an IR blaster. And then you have one remote that is able to control all those devices in one. So let’s get it set up and show you how it works now, here in the box of the Harmony, smart control. Первый, we have the Harmony hub. Then here we have the Harmony remote and I think you do need to put in the battery you just pop off the bottom here and you can place the battery in and then it also comes with a micro, USB charging cable, as well as a power cable For the harmony hub, and then it comes with a IR blaster that has a really long cable so that you can get to a device that it may not be able to reach just with the hub.

So now we need to plug in the Harmony hub and wait 30 seconds for it to get powered up and then we’re gon na go head into the app to get this all set up. The very first thing I’m going to do is go through and take a picture of all the components that I’m going to be connecting today, just so that I have them on record, and I don’t have to keep going back and forth here on the back. You have a pair reset button, the USB port and then two IR blaster ports. One tip I have on making sure your entertainment center is working properly is to have clean cable management. It is vital to having the best entertainment experience possible, so here I’m, going to place the IR blaster in front of my receiver, because there is a barrier between these different cabinet slots and then I’m just gon na plug in the harmony hub. And it will sit right here and it’s mainly going to be controlling the blu ray player in here, and I guess it will control the Samsung TV as well. Now that we have the harmony hub plugged in it is flashing, a red light on the front and we’re gon na go into the Harmony app so make sure that you’re connected to your Wi Fi, just to make sure everything’s gon na work well and then here We’Re going to open harmony, and then here it says, setup a new hub, so we’re gon na select that it doesn’t need to know your home’s location and then here it will run you through step by step what you need to do so there it’s scan my Networks here it found my 2.

4 gigahertz Network. Then I need to enter the password now. It will go through the process of connecting the hub directly to my Wi Fi, so that I don’t need to have my phone nearby to be able to control it. And now you will need to create an account with Logitech so I’m just going to set one up here and then here I received a software update. Just took a few minutes to complete. Хорошо, it has finished updating the remote so now we’re going to get to know a few things. So here we can learn more about the remote it uses. Rf signals to be able to send things to the hubs, so it will work through cabinet doors and other obstacles. So here we learn a little bit more about the Harmony hub. It uses IR to control devices and we’ll also use Bluetooth to control like your Playstation or your Nintendo Wii and PC and computers, and then here it talks about some of the best places you might want to put the hub for the best experience. So here we have the IR mini blaster, so you connect this to the back of the device and then it is able to control another IR device which the hub cannot reach and then just like I did with my receiver. I moved it on to the other side of the cabinet, so it could be reached alright next we’re going to go to the next setup, so I don’t already own a Harmony remote.

You could transfer what you’ve already set up, but here I’m going to select set up new and then we can also add certain devices that we already have in our home that are connected to our accounts right to the harmony hub, so that you can control them. As well so on, my network could also found my life ex bulbs, my amazon, firetv chromecast, as well as Nexus player. The chromecast is a different room as well the lifx so we’re not going to control those here, we’re just going to select those two and select next here it added those devices. And if I want to add anymore, I would just select, add device, and here we’re, going to add an entertainment device and we’re going to add the TV once the TV was done. I then went in and added my blu ray player, the receiver and I was able to even add my Wii. U so first I’m going to go through and add all of the entertainment devices and then I’m gon na go through and add any of the extra home control devices that I want. You could add your Philips hue, your nest, thermostat smart things all of these different products here you can also add your computer. If you want Windows, Mac and other, and then you could just scan for Wi Fi devices like it did at the beginning, so I think I’ve added pretty much everything. I want to control right now so I’m going to go back and we’ve added everything that I have set up here on this TV and then I’m just going to select next so here it says you may need to reposition your hub and mini blasters to ensure They reach all your, I art connected devices and then here it mentions.

If you have the hub inside a cabinet like we do here, you may want to position the IR blaster outside, so that it could control those devices so now I’m going to go through and make sure all the components work. So here, if I press receiver off, it turned off turn back on here: let’s try the Samsung blu ray player. You need to press on and there it turned on and it actually turned on the TV at the same time, and now here let’s try the Samsung TV turning it off and there it turned off. So everything is working properly. I don’t need to go through the fix setup, so here we’re going to create a watch activity, so let’s say I want to watch blu ray. It would automatically turn on all the components that need, or I want to watch the fire TV. It will do all that, so the first activity I’m going to create is let’s, say we want to watch Amazon fire TV, so I’m going to set up where it has the TV fire TV and the receiver so now says make sure that your fire TV is Turned on and we’re going to go through, it says that it’s powering on the Samsung TV fire TV and the onkyo receiver. So all my devices are currently on and then we want to make sure that we change the correct input on the TV. So here on the TV we are currently on HDMI input, one you can see it says it up there on the TV and then here on the receiver, we are going to go to aux and we go done.

Are you able to hear and see the TV? Да, alright let’s test it out. So there my TV turned on, went to the correct input my receiver turned on as well and is on the right input. Сооо, Да, it worked correctly. So now we could add some of our favorite channels, but we’re just going to skip that for now. We don’t typically actually watch over the air TV on here so now, I’m going to go through and add my Nexus player. So before you do this, you may want to go through and double check what inputs and what devices are connected to each other. Хорошо, so that is the correct. Hdmi go through a select, an input on the receiver. All of my inputs are actually aux because it’s just coming right out of the TV through an optical cable, into the receiver, select next and now we’re going to test it out. Хорошо, so here asks if we hear sound, we could play that test. The sound and now it’s actually going to pair the Harmony remote with our actual Nexus player so that I could control my Android TV right from the remote. So then I’m going to long press the bottom of my Nexus player. Сооо, depending on what device you have, it may be different, but the harmony hub has been programmed to know all of these different things, so here I’m, going to say harmony, Nexus, player controller, so I’m going to select ok with my original remote and then over here On my phone it says that the harmony hub is now successfully paired so over here on the TV you can see that when I’m, using the Harmony remote, I can press the buttons and just like using the original remote everything is working, довольно прохладно.

So I went through and added my Wii. U, as well as my blu ray player, to a different action. Так что теперь, if I want to change any of these, I can go back in and on the amazon firetv I don’t want to say watch TV. I want to watch a movie so we’re going to select the Amazon, icon and say watch movie done and then, when you go in here, you have a bunch of different other options. So here it’s already created these sequences that it will do to turn on and off different items, and you could also come in here and automatically set a time where it’s going to do that. So so let’s say we want to create an activity. So it turns off every single day at a certain time. So let’s go into the schedule here and I’m going to go in to start I’m going to say I will actually start it up and then we’re gon na go next and then I’m going to do n so end is when it would turn off the activity And I’m gon na set the time and I’m gon na set it to 11 o’clock at night. Let’S just say that maybe we forget to turn it off there I’m going to have it turn off at 11 p.m. and then I’m gon na do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and I think that’s good the weekend. We may be using it at that time.

So there we go, it is now schedule that so it will automatically turn off, and here I could select a keyboard function, so select the device you want to use when the keyboard is on for watch TV. So we want to use the keyboard for the Amazon fire TV. So now it is running through the instructions on how we would pair our fire TV to the harmony hub. So on the TV I’m gon na go into settings I’m going to go down here into controllers, then I’m gon na go to other Bluetooth devices, add a Bluetooth device here. It says harmony keyboard and then you can see on the app that it is doing its magic and pairing them together and there it has been successfully paired. You can go next and there we go. We have all of that set up. So now I could go through and adjust any of these that I want to. I do have one more activity. Let’S say I do want to actually watch TV, so here we’re going to say, watch Smart TV, so this is just going to control my TV and my receiver because that’s, where I play the volume all those devices are on and then let’s select the input which Would be TV now that I have all my different activities set up I’m going to go to the next menu here and here it will teach you how to use the Harmony remote to launch your different activities.

So here we have the activity launch button. So up here at the top, we have three different activities and we can set them to do a short press and a long press. So let’s say when we short press the music button it’s going to watch TV, let’s change the long press to watch blu ray. So let’s have the short press, be Nexus player and then down here the long press, let’s change it to the Wii? U and then here the short press would be to watch a movie and then here we have the long press which can be the watch. Smart TV again – and you can add the same one – to multiple actions as well. There’S no way to just choose a blank action, so you could have up to six total, which is pretty cool so now that we’ve set that up we’re going to select next and then set up using your Harmony. App is now complete, both the Harmony app and the remote can now control your devices, so you can actually use the phone app or you can use the Harmony remote right here, so your devices will now be powered off. So when I select exit it’s going to automatically turn off all those devices – and I did shut the cabinets to make sure everything is still working now, it has completed everything we have all of our different activities right here on the main page. If I wanted to watch a movie, I could just tap on it and it will watch a movie and it takes me right in to the Amazon fire TV now here on the screen.

We have our options, so I can scroll up and down and go left and right so first to try to control my Samsung TV. But now, when I select this, it will be the Amazon fire remote that I’m actually controlling. So we have all the different tabs there that we can go in and then if we want to use our remote as well, we can do that. So I can go down and I can control everything with this remote and there we have a bunch of different actions there. Так что теперь, if we go back, we could choose a different activity and then we can also see all of our devices and control them individually and then up here in the menu. We do have a bunch of different options, so we can fix anything that’s wrong. We could power off watch movie, so we could turn everything off change hubs. We could set a sleep timer edit and reset go to the Harmony setup, harmony upgrade as well as different app settings. So here we can turn on notifications. You can actually pull down the notification tray and right here you can jump between your different actions. So if I want to jump in and watch a movie, I just tap that I’m going to automatically turn on the TV, the receiver and my blu ray player. All in one auto disk lock is disabled. We could dim the screen or watching a movie or when we’re just sitting there, and then here we have haptic feedback, enabled so now let’s try a few different things over here on the remote, so let’s say we wanted to watch we.

So if I long press this middle button, it should change the activity in there. It’S notifying me on the phone itself. So now it looks like on the Wii. I can even control and go to different settings with the Harmony remote, which is pretty cool, so that’s started right up. Let’S go to the Nexus player just by pressing that button once and now, you’ll see again on the phone. It is switching input alright and now it is using the Nexus player and I can use this to go through and find anything to watch. So there are a lot of different options right on the remote. You have numbers volume control so anytime. I change the volume that’s actually changing it right on my receiver, which is really nice. I have channel up and down control. Хорошо, here I have a mute option back and then, when I’m completely done, all I need to do is press the off button up here on the top and it will automatically turn off everything TV receiver. All of that all in one one cool thing that I like is that anytime, I can press the volume button while I’m using the app and there you can see that it’s changing my volume on the receiver. Нво, one of the things you may find is that it does not have all the functions in here. So if you need to add a specific button to this, all you need to do is go back and then down here.

We want to hit edit activities and then we will want to go into that so we’re gon na do watch blu, ray and now down. Here we have the option to customize the remote. So here I can tap to change and then here it gives you an option of what buttons on your harmony remote are available for you to adjust. So here down at the bottom let’s say I want to change the e key, so I’m going to press E and then here I could assign a name to it and for this name, we’re going to use the Samsung blu ray player. And then we are going to assign a command which here we want to eject the disc, so I’m going to select, eject and then I’m gon na hit next and then next one more time and we are complete on adding that so it’s going to sync the Changes to my remote now on my Harmony remote when I press E, it should eat, checked the blu ray player, except, Я думаю, it’s broken, and that is how I remove four remotes from my entertainment center and control them all by one device. If you have any further questions about the Harmony, smart control, let me know in the comments below and if you’d like, to see how to connect these devices to your smart assistants. Make sure you select the video right here.

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