I don't even know where to start here, I've been looking for universal remotes to use with my various AV setups for 20 some odd years now.
To be fair, my AV setups (8 of them currently) range from a simple TV to a full 9.2.4 Dolby Atmos theater.
The first remote being the original Philips Pronto, an ugly fiddley geekster oriented, yet capable IR only device that I used for several years, until well, its demise...
The second on the list was a Nevo S70 which I purchased from an installer who also gave me the configuration software, I spend months writing code for this thing, only to find out that the only reason I was able to get this device in the first place was that it was already end of life, I think that remote was like 6 or 7 hundred bucks...
Then I went the Harmony route, first with IR, then the hub based products, I probably had 5 of these at one point, while they worked, their lack of IP support or any other realistic local third party support and the seemingly lack of them being able to do exactly what I wanted eventually got the lot of them binned...
Third was what seemed to be the perfect remote which started and ended with a kickstarter project, the NEEO. I picked up two Black Cats for $450, they took forever to fulfill and whilst a little buggy here and there they did work for some of my more complex setups. And by far the best looking hardware to date. Well the end of that came when that company sold to Control 4, and that was the end of that story. C4 did maintain the device cloud configuration library for several years, until recently, and now they are bricks to me, I think they can be rooted, but I don't have the time for that.
The two of these are for sale if anyone is interested.
For the Atmos theater I built I needed something else, so I went the pro route and settled on RTI. I needed to become a dealer to even get near this stuff and eventually picked up an XP-3 training kit, which at the time was like a grand...
I had very high hopes for this and have probably spent weeks programming this thing, but could never get it to properly control an nvidia shield. I tried several different ways of getting the nav to work via various ADB and IP addons, it was always glitchy and slow, my last go to was using an FLIRC and IR, but no matter what the XP-3 just wouldn't send understandable commands over IR, epic failure.
I was able to hack in some code to get some button presses out of this thing to control the lighting in the theater, this did and continues to work well.
Also the XP-3 controller would occasionally lock up and require a reboot, same for the remote itself. IP control of the AV10 AVP sucked, so I switched over to IR, but long press volume was non existent, or when it did work just blasted and blasted, stupid thing. Maybe I could have fixed this with endless dinking with control repeats, whatever.
In the end the most reliable control of nvidia shields (and other android tv variants) is over bluetooth, which the XP-3 doesn't support...
So that theater currently has the big â– â– â– RTI remote running everything but nvidia navigation and the nvidia remote running navigation...
So i was in search of another solution specifically for the theater...
I've been looking at sofabaton for a while as the brand keeps popping up here and there, but I was specifically wanting a remote that could pair to the shield via bluetooth, then see if there were any hooks into Hubitat that I could leverage for the theater lighting (and there are).
Well it turns out that the sofabaton XS1 could possibly fit the bill.
So I pulled the trigger one a few days ago and within 30 minutes had all the previous activities working over IR as well as having the device pair with the shield and working as well as the factory remote for navigation.
So next on to getting commands into Hubitat...
I don't have the need to command activities from Hubitat (though this is supposedly possible via their cloud API), i just need to be able to map some buttons on the remote to Hubitat events.
So in the sofabaton configuration app at the very bottom of the Wi-Fi add device section there is a very undocumented "Create a virtual device for IP control" link.
Creating a device and commands from this one is able to send events to Hubitat's LAN listener port of 39501.
There are all sorts of bugs in this interface, such as, it says the supported URL format is http:xxxx..., when it's actually http://xxxx as one would expect.
If you're thinking of doing a post without a route at the end of the request, it won't work.
and adding properly formatted JSON to the body is an epic failure, but just putting in simple text in the body works just fine.
I didn't try the other methods that are supported (route paths and query parameters), as the body text is good enough for what I need.
So in the end this remote is going to fit the bill, the hardware isn't as nice as the NEEOS, but I'm over it, I just need something that works and isn't loaded with buttons (who uses numbers on remotes anymore anyway?)
I haven't finished the driver yet, but I'm getting all the data I need to finish one out.
And this remote was less than 200 bucks...
For those that have made this far, basic driver posted:
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