I ran into an odd problem recently with my Harmony 360. I'd made a small tweak to the interdevice delay for my DVD player, and after updating the remote I found that Activity switching was no longer working properly. I quickly determined that the problem was that the Harmony was no longer selecting the input on my Audio/Video switch device, defined as a Radio Shack "Deluxe 6 In 2 Out Selector."

Now this is a very simple device; it has only 6 working commands, one for switching to each input. Even more strangely, I couldn't correct the problem with Help. This eliminated my first hypothesis, which was that there was some kind of timing problem. However, I could still switch to the correct input from Device mode, demonstrating that the Harmony had not somehow forgotten the correct commands.

Perhaps the Activities had somehow dropped the device? This didn't seem likely, since in that case Help mode wouldn't even be trying to reset the input on the Selector, but I checked the Activities on my Harmony Home Page, anyway; all correctly included the device and had the correct input set.

Perhaps the input selection definition for the Selector had somehow gotten changed? I checked it on the home page and it all looked correct. Just to be sure, I relearned the 6 input IR commands (these are not standard, by the way; the Radio Shack Selector doesn't have its own remote and will learn any IR commands you choose). Still no luck.

Just to see if the Harmony was somehow emitting the wrong IR codes (even though they seemed correct and worked from Device mode), I tried to reset the input using Help mode while viewing the Harmony's IR emitter through the LCD "viewfinder" of my digital camera. Digital cameras see infrared light, so this is a handy way to check if a remote is working. I was able to verify that the emitters weren't lighting up at all when I tried to correct the input from Help mode, even though I could see them flicker when I successfully changed inputs from Device mode.

Now thinking that the Device definition had somehow become corrup, I created a second Radio Shack selector Device from scratch, taught it the correct IR codes, and added it to my Activities. Still no luck.

Finally, as a last resort before calling Harmony (this was clearly a nontrivial problem that would likely take Harmony tech support days to fix). I created a new selector device, but this time I defined it as a Video Storm CSW62. I actually have this device in my system (I use the Radio Shack to switch digital audio and the Video Storm to switch component video), but since I've set both selectors to use the same IR commands (like the Radio Shack, the Video Storm will learn arbitrary commands), I never had any need to define them separately. I taught the Harmony the same set of IR commands for this device that I'd been using for the Radio Shack device, and added it to my Activities. Amazingly, this solved the problem, and I was able to delete the non functional Radio Shack Device Definition from my Device list.

It always bugs me when I end up fixing a problem without fully understanding it. Was the problem in my Harmony remote's device definition? Then why didn't creating a new Radio Shack selector device fixi it? A guess that fits the data is that the device definition for the Radio Shack has become damaged (although it would have to be in a non-obvious way) in Harmony's data base, but this seems unlikely to me.

Is anybody else using the Radio Shack selector? I'd be interested in knowing if it is working.