Harmony 890 Pro & Vizia
- Thread starter jarcher
- Start date
remoteshoppe
Member
Right now the Harmony 890 and 1000 have limited Z-Wave capabilities. They will control the on/off of your lights but there have been a ton of problems reported regarding bright/dim and scene control. Harmony and Monster (who they developed the ZWave with) have been promising upgrades for a few months now and a lot of owners are getting very frustrated. My advice would be to wait before getting one of these specifically for Vizia control.
Ug, well my remote came with the rest of the equipment, which is how I learned about Z-Wave to begin with. I have not opened it yet, is there a better choice?remoteshoppe said:
If there is an update, is it a matter of updating firmware or will I have to throw it out and buy a new one?
Can I run it through a PC, so the remote sends commands to a PC and the PC then controls the devices?
Thanks...
I'm interested in this topic as well, even though I use UPB. My Harmony 880 remote got stolen as part of my house burglary, and I'm thinking about replacing it with an 890 or Monster 300 remote with Z-wave capability. I guess my real question here is are these remotes compatible with the Intermatic USB stick? That way, HomeSeer could receive Zwave commands from the remote and turn them into UPB lighting commands... does this sound reasonable?
I know nothing about UPB (well, very little) but I would be concerned about the range og my Z-Wave remote. You would need to be in range of the PC if there are no other Z-Wave devices in the house. I think the range is quite short, like 30 feet (from reading Liviton's stuff).DeLicious said:
Squintz
Senior Member
I use the Monster AVL 300 remote which controls their Illuminessence brand of z-wave devices just fine. I actually prefer the AVL 300 over the Harmony as a universal IR remote also since it supports multiple room profiles. Currently the AVL 300 controls at least binary, dimmers and blinds(since binds use the lighting protocol). Illuminessence is the same thing as ViziaRF. I am also using the AVL 300 remote with ACT devices.
The only down side to the Monster that is pretty much a down side to all z-wave devices is that each remote manufacture wants to make their remote the primary remote for your setup and many times they overlook the fact that you may want to use their remote as a secondary. The monster is nice but as a primary controller I prefer to use my Intermatic USB stick with ControlThink Software. From there I would like to replicate the remote to My Elk and Other universal remotes. None of the universal remotes I have tested so far (Harmony 890, AVL 300, and Sirius Conductor) do this well.
I have brought this issue up many times with the alliance and have gotten a few responces back and they are aware of the problem but no real good answer has been made public yet. The best thing you can do is start writing e-mails to Harmony and Monster (I have the contact information) and tell them where you would like to see things changed.
I am not sure what they have been doing but they have been promising firmware upgrades for a long time now and these issues should be getting worked out.
The only down side to the Monster that is pretty much a down side to all z-wave devices is that each remote manufacture wants to make their remote the primary remote for your setup and many times they overlook the fact that you may want to use their remote as a secondary. The monster is nice but as a primary controller I prefer to use my Intermatic USB stick with ControlThink Software. From there I would like to replicate the remote to My Elk and Other universal remotes. None of the universal remotes I have tested so far (Harmony 890, AVL 300, and Sirius Conductor) do this well.
I have brought this issue up many times with the alliance and have gotten a few responces back and they are aware of the problem but no real good answer has been made public yet. The best thing you can do is start writing e-mails to Harmony and Monster (I have the contact information) and tell them where you would like to see things changed.
I am not sure what they have been doing but they have been promising firmware upgrades for a long time now and these issues should be getting worked out.
I could be wrong. The Leviton users guids said that the devices should all be within 30 feet of another device, but maybe the remote has a longer range. Then again, Z-Wave is a two-way transmission, so the remote needs to be able to receive a response from the device it was commanding.DeLicious said:
How about this idea. I just had it while reading another forum. Can we get the Harmony 980 to send commands to the Vizia scene and zone controllers via the Z-Wave to IR bridging device? I saw a document where Leviton published the IR codes. This might be a decent workaround until the software in the remote is fixed.
This is actually a pretty interesting idea, Intermatic USB stick gets the signal, tells the PC to turn on a UPB (or any other protocol with a plug into the same PC). I was thinking about using a Zwave + other protocol (Insteon items maybe with an X10 floodlamp added in). That might be a good way to control all items with CQC telling each protocol what to do.
Is what Delicious asked possible?
IVB
Senior Member
Yeah, sure, but not currently using a "zwave remote". You could get a whole-house RF/IR remote ie my MX850 (or it's much cheaper younger cousin, the 650 - i think). The remote broadcasts RF to it's base station (ie MRF300), which retransmits the desired code in IR. A USB-UIRT picks that up and does whatever you want. Could be UPB (via elk), zWave, Insteon, DVD, stereo, or really anything under CQC control.
I don't know much about the zWave remotes or what it would look like in that world, though.
I don't know much about the zWave remotes or what it would look like in that world, though.
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