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I am attempting to set up the skip one remote on an older win10 laptop so that I can use said laptop as a media hub kinda thing- for watching like youtube in browser as well as other applications. I am having a lot of trouble finding tutorials for what I need to do, essentially, I got the remote to work with like the volume keys, but I am not sure how to get it to control the cursor? For example, how if you aim the remote at your TV and it has a little cursor, or how like a WII mote controls a cursor? For context, I have both the FLIRC USB and the skip one remote, I am programing the remote on my newer laptop as it has type C + USB inputs and then trying to put the FLIRC USB back on the older win10 laptop, and it registers the inputs but it won't move the cursor? We also have a magic remote but that's for the TV we currently use- I am not sure if also the model type is correct for what I am doing? I choose Media Center PC > PC > FLIRC > and then I'm not sure about the brand? Any help or suggestions are appreciated- thanks!

Howdy! My Skip 1s bundle arrived today, and I spent the better part of the afternoon setting things up. I have things working how I want (more or less), and I'm generally happy with the end result. (Happy customer here!) That said, my Day 1 experience has left me with a lot of thoughts I'd like to share. Hope they help. :) User Profile Hardware: TCL Roku TV, Yamaha HTR-3063 receiver, Audio Technica ATLP60-BT turntable, Dell XPS 9560 being used as HTPC, Ubuntu server for self-hosted services Software (HTPC): Plex HTPC, Steam Big Picture, Spotify, YouTube TV Previous Universal Remote experience: None (i.e. no past experience with a Harmony remote) Technical know-how: I work in open source for $DAYJOB. :) TL;DR Purchase, shipping, and packaging were all top-notch. Hardware design and build quality are 10/10. Software experience was workable, but unpolished and full of little friction points. Support experience (Gitbook documentation, forums, Skip app "tips" pane) felt difficult to navigate, mainly due to "information overload". The support docs contain a lot of redundant information spread out over multiple different sections. Rarely is there one definitive place to look for information. Notes → Skip 1s The remote itself seems to aim for the niche of "simple, straightforward button interface backed by powerful configuration software under the hood", as opposed to other remotes in the space that aim for flashy hardware (at the cost of simplicity, battery life, etc.) To that end, I appreciate the lack of a screen, Wi-fi/Bluetooth, reliance on Cloud servers, etc. The 1s feels like it has a hacker's spirit, and this was a main motivation for me in purchasing it over Sofabatons, a used Harmony, etc. The windowless IR works surprisingly well! Nit: Shipping with a USB-C to USB-C cable felt a bit awkward. I needed to swap for a USB-C to USB-A to get started, though it might be that the USB-C port on my laptop is borked. Nit: I still haven't figured out what the Color button is actually meant to do. You can hover over it in the Skip App to reveal a "Switch to Colors mode" tooltip, but what this actually means is never elaborated anywhere I could find. → Skip App Working with the Skip App was manageable, but felt like 'death by a thousand paper-cuts'. Nothing I faced was truly dealbreaking, but my patience felt challenged at every turn. Tantacrul (popular software developer/musician with a fantastic series on UX and interface design) would have a field day here. High level feedback: Activities The concept of an "Activity" is difficult to intuit at first. I now know it to mean something along the lines of "The Skip 1s button interface allows you to mix and match buttons from multiple devices. You can also store up to three 3 different layouts on the remote, and switch between them on the fly with the A/B/C buttons." In other words, despite now understanding what an Activity is supposed to represent, my mental model still doesn't revolve around activities per se ("watch TV", "play games"), but around devices. To me, the A/B/C buttons act as a convenient way to swap between combinations of devices, but they are not the main focus. In fact, I suspect that 95% of my usage will take place on a single Activity because of how powerful a single Activity can be in its own right (due to customization, macros, etc.). Despite my mental model revolving around devices, the Skip App bases its design around Activities deeply. The setup wizard throws the user right into creating their first Activity before anything else. Many of the settings are only accessible via the Activity Manager, buried into hidden submenus. But, to me, it would make more sense to downplay the concept of Activities from the setup wizard, instead sticking only to Activity A and invoking Activity Management for B/C only when the user has fully learned their way around a single initial button layout. This leads to one of my main gripes: There is no way to manage devices without first going through Activities. Because of my "devices-first" mental model, I assumed that I would first build a library of devices in my home, and then assign their buttons to one of the 3 layouts in a piecemeal fashion. Maybe I would start by assigning 1 device to the entire remote (e.g. my HTPC), and then manually override some of the buttons with my AV receiver, TV, etc. when appropriate (volume, power, etc.). However, this isn't possible; I must start the Activity Wizard, define a singular theme of the activity ahead of time, add devices within the Activity, pick a (very simplified) mapping of devices to functionality, menu through a basically-useless "Activity Summary", and only then begin to set button-by-button overrides. This is a very roundabout way of doing things that comes with a key downside: It is not easy to re-use devices between Activities (because Activity is the main unit, and devices live within the Activity). I see there is a greyed-out "Clone Activity" option under the "Management" tab, but it is not discoverable (and potentially not even usable at this stage). Based on the marketing copy, Activities are a way of making the remote accessible for a general audience ("for most people the startup wizard will do almost everything needed"). But, I don't think the startup wizard really is sufficient, meaning that most users will end up having to configure the remote beyond the wizard anyway. And, because the deeper configuration is harder to grok, most users will run into a wall as soon as they try to break out of the "Activity" model and apply what they already know. Individual Skip App nitpicks The "Tips" pane is pretty, but not very useful. It takes up a lot of visual space and is constantly visible (even when tips are no longer needed). The little animations were done with care, but are small and difficult to map to the rest of the UI. The tips are simultaneously too exhaustive and not exhaustive enough; they explain settings that are self-explanatory, while also not providing enough explanation for the more complex settings. I think all of the content here could live in the Gitbook, and/or in tooltips/descriptions attached to the UI elements themselves. There is a "Tip" section related to a "Toolbar" that doesn't seem to exist. Button timing can only be adjusted when a button contains multiple commands, contrary to what the "Advanced Editing > Adjust Button Timing tip" would have you believe. (I thought this would be a way to introduce an inter-command delay to prevent signal spam when holding down a button.) The animations truly are excessive. Pretty, but slow and a hindrance to usability. The two icons in the top-right of the window are not intuitive, and do not provide hover tooltips that name the tabs. I now realize the names are "Activities" and "Remote Manager", but the names are placed in a strange location (top-ish left). The buttons do not match the screenshot in Gitbook. The Remote Manage page contains "Identify Color" options that the device physically cannot produce (e.g. orange). (Also, unless you have multiple Skip 1s remotes, the concept of an identity color kind of feels useless, since most of the time the LEDs are off.) The Activities page is difficult to navigate. The main way to access submenus is to hover over an existing Activity and click either the cogwheel or the ">" icon, the latter of which not being clearly identified as clickable. Even when you know that you can click ">", there is no intuitive way to tell which options will be behind which button. To learn the interface, you must click everything, then build your own mental map from trial and error. (Also, as mentioned previously, there are no ways to quickly edit the devices within an activity without going through the Wizard each and every time.) It is awkward and slow to select the device type on the "Do you want to setup a new device?" page due to the L/R paging. Only 3 are displayed at once, and to get to e.g. the PC category, 3 additional (blind) ">" clicks are needed. A dropdown here would probably suffice here. The "Record" button was perpetually greyed out for me on the Brand/Model select screen, despite being prominently featured in the Gitbook. The behavior of the "Test Device" button is difficult to predict. Sending a power on signal without warning is a bit jarring. Auto-assigning a UI color to a device and being unable to reassign it is a bit unfriendly, and possibly the result of a lack of a "Devices" management screen as opposed to an "Activities" management screen. I found a few typos (e.g. "JMUP FORWARD 30s" in the Flirc device button options, "Which device controls yours media/music?" visible even in the Gitbook). I encountered many small visual glitches on any Windows display not set at 1080p/100% scaling. Higher scaling is often the "Recommended" option in Windows, especially since your typical HTPC will be attached to a TV, and 4K TVs are quickly becoming the norm. Ditto for anyone with a laptop with a resolution <1080p. The Skip App cannot be maximized, and will try to fight you if you click the Maximize button, flickering aggressively. → Flirc USB 2 Similarly to the Skip 1s, the dongle seems impeccably built. I have had no troubles with the receiver picking up commands from the remote. → Flirc software My perspective here is as a new user trying to pair the Skip 1s with the Flirc USB. But, I fully understand that the Flirc USB came first (2012), and so its software is built with that initial use-case in mind. But, I think this "legacy" design hinders the usability for new customers. Integration (or lack thereof) between Skip 1s and Flirc USB 2 When browsing the Skip 1s page, the marketing copy says "The Skip 1s remote has been designed from the ground up to integrate with Flirc USB." But, to me, the integration feels like a bit of an afterthought? The Skip 1s does its thing (universal remote with customizable layouts), and the Flirc USB 2 does its thing (converting IR signals into keypresses), but they don't really integrate in any meaningful way. I would have expected some sort of dedicated setup flow for people who purchase the bundle, but in practice, combining the Skip 1s+Flirc USB 2 is no different than combining any other universal remote and the Flirc USB 2. Because of the lack of dedicated setup flow, it is difficult to know how to actually set up the Flirc USB 2 as a "device" in the Skip App settings. With enough troubleshooting, I realized that you need to pick the "PC" device category, select "Flirc", then arbitrarily select a Model from among the confusing options (Kodi? PLEX? WMC?). It is unclear how any of these settings relate to the Flirc USB 2 as a device. Once the device is set up in the Skip App, it is unclear how any of the button settings actually relate to the Flirc software. With enough troubleshooting, I realized that all of the configured Flirc buttons on the Activity layout in the Skip App are actually meaningless. It doesn't matter which button sends which IR signal -- they could be completely random, since the actual configuration occurs in the Flirc software, where any arbitrary IR signal gets converted to any arbitrary keypress. (Again, a sign that the Skip 1s does its own thing and the Flirc USB does its own thing, with little eye to interoperability.) Here is an example to drive the above point home: I noticed when setting up an Activity using the "Flirc" device + TV/Yamaha receiver, the auto-generated layout doesn't assign any Flirc keys to the Skip 1s "Channel Up/Down" buttons. But, I wanted to map Channel Up/Down to Alt+Tab/Alt+Shift+Tab to switch between HTPC programs. At first, I couldn't realize how to do this because when looking at the Flirc devices library of commands, there weren't really any appropriate IR signals I could even assign to the Channel Up/Down buttons. To fix this, I ended up using the Volume Up/Down IR signals (since they weren't in use thanks to the Yamaha receiver), and then converting the Volume Up/Down IR signals to the necessary keypresses. Truly arbitrary, and very counterintuitive for the average user. I don't really know how you would fix this beyond changing your marketing copy to really clarify that the Flirc USB came first (2012), and the Skip 1s came second (2021), and that they were never really designed to harmonize beyond both being top-notch at their individual roles. General software nitpicks The concept of "Controllers" is similar in spirit to the concept of "Activities" in that both are abstractions designed to simplify the configuration for basic users. I think "Controllers" works a bit better, however I still find that the concept introduces unnecessary menuing for moderate-to-advanced users. For myself in particular who wishes to configure an HTPC with multiple apps, I find it strange the PC input is split between the "Full Keyboard" controller and the "Media Keys" controller. Not only that, but the "Full Keyboard" isn't really a full keyboard per se, as it represents only the "ANSI QWERTY keyboard layout (US)" (sans the "backspace" key, which is peculiarly replaced by a second "Delete" key -- I had to go to "Minimalist" just to find the Back button.). The dropdown menu for "Controllers" feels dated and disordered, with HTPC-specific controllers scattered amongst devices that may have made sense circa 2012, but don't make as much sense in 2024 (Microsoft WMC, XBOX 360, etc.). Likewise, there are no modern HTPC apps ("Plex HTPC", "Steam Big Picture", "Spotify", etc.). These probably aren't even necessary (due to Full Keyboard covering most everything), but it adds to the dated feeling. It also gives mixed signals when the Skip App has "PLEX" but the Flirc USB does not. When the lack of modern Controller layouts is combined with the quirky logo/font, the lime green color scheme reminiscent of old Spotify, and the skeuomorphic 3D design, it really feels like using a piece of software whose interface hasn't been updated in a over a decade. In general, if a single controller doesn't suit your needs, then you have to bounce between various controllers trying to find the one that contains a desired key. It is not immediately clear that you can have multiple "active" controllers at one time, either, so initially there is some concern if you start setting up a controller only to realize that it's missing some key. (Do I have to start over? No, but it seems that way at first.) Controller layouts give no indication of which controller keys have already been configured. There is no highlighting. Likewise, there isn't really a great way to tell which of the IR signals have already been used. The only way you can tell is by trying to record an IR signal that has already been recorded, at which point you get an abrupt pop-up that provides only a warning (but no actionable buttons). It would be nice if the pop up actually said which controller button is associated with the already-taken IR signal. It would also be nice if the pop-up provided an option to "overwrite anyway", even if the IR signal was already used. The "Erase" procedure is hindered by the lack of indication for which buttons/IR signals are already taken. The only way that "Erase" can be constructively used is immediately after an "IR signal already taken" pop-up. This necessitates a lot of awkward menuing, and uncertainty about what is actually being erased. It would be nice if we could also erase buttons in a Controller layout (in tandem with UI highlighting of which buttons are already used). The "Minimalist" layout contains a "Go!" button that seems to begin the process of auto-assigning all buttons. However, the "Go!" button also turns to "STOP" whenever any button is being recorded, which is a bit strange. This button is also not present on any other layout. The "Advanced" menu settings are kind of strange. The page doesn't really provide any substantial options, which makes it quite disappointing to open. One example situation I ran into was: "I'd like to see if I can configure the amount of time the FLIRC will take before a button hold becomes a repeated button press. Oh! An advanced menu! Neat!" only to run into a barebones menu with... 1/3 taken up by disabling parts of the controller menu (???), another 1/3 taken up by Firmware flashing options (with a greyed out "Wake up" checkbox), and the final 1/3 taken up by a confusing "Recording mode" setting. What does this do? Am I supposed to switch the recording mode every time I want to set a long press or a macro? If this is something that will be toggled on every button recording, then why is it buried in a menu? I haven't even bothered trying to use this feature due to all of the extra menuing it would necessitate, and the lack of visual indication of what mode I'm on in the actual controller layout screens. Like the Skip App, the Flirc window can't be usefully maximized, and yet the button isn't greyed out. I've given a lot of feedback here, but again, nothing was dealbreaking to me. The hardware is impeccable, and the apps are simple enough that it was quick for me to learn my way around their quirks. But, the app probably shouldn't have quirks to work around in the first place. As it stands, this feels like the sort of product that only DIY enthusiasts would have the patience to use... there are just too many rough edges for me to recommend this to a less technically-inclined person. I really do recommend watching some Tantacrul videos to get a feel for the "Jank" I'm describing here, as the vibe is eerily similar. Thanks for all your hard work in maintaining this project. I've read through a lot of forum replies, and as an open-source maintainer myself, I understand the toll it takes. I've also read horror stories about running a hardware business on HN, so I can't imagine the stress you face. Apologies for adding to the choir of voices -- ultimately, I want this product to succeed. :)

Hi all, I’ve just gotten my Skip1s and USB bundle. Really excited and trying to get things set up, but I’m running into a problem I can’t seem to solve. Issue: Can’t control Plex via Skip1s as programmed in Skip app Set up: Skip1s programmed “PC” for “Flirc” and “Plex” in Skip app v0.9.956 beta. Synced to “A” Activity button FLIRC USB and software v3.27.10 Windows 11 Pro Plex HTPC v10.0.22631 Observations: Controls as programmed via the settings synced from Skip app to “A” activity don’t trigger the expected behaviour in Plex. I am able to program some aspects of Plex controls with Skip1s via FLIRC USB software, but not all (so obviously not desirable long term). When no settings are programmed in FLIRC USB software and the device log is set to “Enable IR Debugging”, IR signals from Skip1s are detected. Activity “B” settings for TV and Soundbar work as programmed in Skip app. FLIRC USB doesn’t show in Windows Device Manager, including, hidden devices. Attempted remedies: Full system restart Powered Skip1s off/on via removal of batteries for >10 minutes Moved FLIRC USB to multiple alternative usb ports, including a usb hub, front panel and mobo backplate I/O. Program desired settings to activities “B” and “C” via Skip app Reset Skip1s settings in Skip app, used Skip app on alternative windows machine to set up Skip1s as a new device. Used FLIRC USB and software on alternative machine. Outcome: Issue persists, namely, input via Skip1s remote results in no action in Plex. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I love this product already, I just want to make this work and it’ll be perfect.