Hi Everyone,
I’m new here on the forum, but I’ve been obsessively reading through it for the past week or two trying to decide on a new remote. My first ever smart remote was the Harmony One which took a small drop off the coach and rendered the screen unreadable (although still functional). I liked the way the Harmony worked for the most part so I tried out the Harmony 900 last week, which was an epic failure to say the least. After trying to work with customer service all week , the remote just did not function properly – it may be defective. After hearing so many good things about the great build quality of the URC remotes, I ordered myself the R40.
Now I consider myself to be a techy kind of guy and DIY oriented, but this remote seems to be throwing me through a loop big time. First of all, I’m having typical issues of having the remote find the correct codes for my TV. I went through all of them and not one enabled the individual selection buttons for each input. The stock remote doesn’t have these buttons either, but the Harmony does. So I was able to find the screen with those buttons and learn them to the R40.
My big question is how to best mimic “Activities” like the Harmony remotes have? I understand it can’t do it exactly but I’d like something close. I’m fine with setting up the “Watch TV” button on the LED screen, but once I’m watching TV and want to watch a Blu-Ray how exactly do I set up a “Watch Blu-Ray” button? Since my wife uses the remote too, I’d like to keep it simple to a button on the LED screen that says “Watch Blu-Ray.” Then once I’m done with movie and want to switch back, how do I get another “Watch TV” on there?
Is this a difficult process to set up? It’s hard for me because it seems like to create the “Watch TV” activity, I was forced to add a duplicate TV device and then turn that device into a macro… Is that what I am/was supposed to do? Seems a little clunky, but who knows.
If anyone can try and explain the best way to set this up I would really, really appreciate it. I’m almost at the point of giving up and getting another Harmony One, I just really don’t want another fragile remote… Thanks in advance.

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Hi. This is a bit late but hope it might be of interest to someone. The 0's and odd device switching in the list of macros at the bottom are from a previous config for JP1, instead of the 0.5sec pauses with R40 which do not seem to count as steps.

Our setup includes two devices, Panasonic BTT370 Home Theatre and DMR DVD recorder/PVR which are not in use very often so have Lime mains IR switches instead of leaving them always in standby. This does involve considerable delay and some other issues when they are occasionally powered up, but that is actually dealt with by including long pauses etc. while they are warming up.

In a similar way, to avoid a blank screen while the Humax PVR's are coming out of standby, the inputs are shown on the hard buttons at the bottom, which can be operated as soon as the devices are seen to be ready. This better illustrates the principles but by timing the delays on a watch these periods have really been handled automatically by including long pauses in their start macros.

These more confusing macro details are not shown but there are options to leave the Humax PVRs ON when going back to Tv. That way they can be e-entered from the Main page while avoiding the delays which are really included in the 'first start up macros' on the Tv device's hard buttons.

On the whole, to get round having to light up the screens of soft buttons, the gadgets can be operated without recourse to the OLED