Review on 🏠 Enhanced Broadlink RM Mini 3 WiFi Smart Home Hub: IR Automation Learning Universal Remote Control with Alexa Compatibility by Bob Schultz

#tldr This product comes with not one but two poorly designed applications coupled with a lack of well translated documentation making this product all but useless to anyone other than enthusiasts and stubborn people. Investing several hours and considerable online research, trial and error did not lead to victory. Challenge: I'm trying to add an outdated, not-so-smart RF-controlled blind to my smart home. It's a Motivia shade from Smith and Noble, which is a perfectly fine product, except unlike their competitors, they don't integrate home automation (yet). Your hues are controlled by a simple T 433.93MHz RF control. So I thought Broadlink would be perfect because it gives me both scheduling/automation and voice control. Prolonged whining: The product is too difficult to handle. The printed manual that comes with the kit is very poorly translated (from Chinese I think). There are also two compatible apps on the Apple App Store, both of which work, but only one is designed to integrate with Alexa (which of course I discovered after spending time setting up the legacy app first). Once the app detected the hardware and set it to WiFi (which took a few tries and resetting the hardware with bent paperclips). Then adding and setting up a remote wasn't so bad. But for the device I want to control I had to set up a custom device because the specific remote control model was not in the device library. This is normal, so I set up a custom device. Pretty quickly I was able to train the software to do the 3 button actions I wanted, namely shade, shade stop, shade. No problem (several repeated requests to try again in the learning cycle, but this is not uncommon when learning IR and RF codes). Now the correct app on my phone has a software remote called Shades. The app communicates with the hub and the blinds can OPEN, STOP and CLOSE. As we like. But really, everything I've created so far is a bulkier replica of a small plastic remote control with my iPhone. One advantage, however: planning. I can do it now and no extra work is required. But my real killer app is the Alexa integration, and this is where it quickly went down the rabbit hole. Firstly, the oAuth API integration between Alexa and Broadcom is pretty bad in my opinion. I first tried setting up the required Broadcom account in the app with an email address that seemed to require a verification email that didn't end up in my inbox or SPAM folder. This means that even though I appear to have set up a Broadcom account successfully and Alexa has Broadcom capability, if I allow Alexa to connect to Broadcom, the Broadcom email/PW credentials will not work. Like 3 times. Now I'll have another shot of caffeine and turn on the music. I then restarted the credentials verification process by setting up my Broadcom account on Facebook and then enabling the Broadcom API in the Alexa app with FB credentials. Finally works. So. I now have a smartphone with the correct app installed, the app is connected to a FB authorized Broadcom work account and Alexa in turn has enabled the Broadcom skill. I'm very happy right now, it only took about 2.5 hours, that's 2.5 hours of my life that I will never get back. I'm making an actual sandwich, oddly older than the you-know-what sandwich, courtesy of the team of sadists who created this hardware/software integration. It seems that when Alexa performs device discovery for this skill, these custom devices are somehow unrecognizable. (See above where my solution required a special device.) I found this information on a message board somewhere in the depths of the internet. And the suggested cure from this dark place was to use what appears to be the only detectable device in this skill instead. This is one of the standard TV remote control configurations included in the Broadcom remote control record. You just grab one of these and then relearn some of the keys in that configuration as you like. Rename the buttons if needed, and then rename this TV here to something like 'Shades' I think, and then recognize the Alexa device again, and finally, by power, your new device. magically appears in Alexa. And guess what? And so it was. Meanwhile, fireworks blaze and a band plays. But like great happiness, this moment is fleeting once the waves of desperate pain crash again. At this point I'm completely exhausted, need some reassurance and ready to get burned. Because . Although this jailbroken device is now available in Alexa, the shadows do not respond when Alexa sends a command. Alexa says OK and the LED on the hardware hub blinks, but the shadows don't even flicker. So I pick up my phone, open the app, press the button in the app to send the exact same command that Alexa sent and the hub responded visually and lo and behold, the curtains OPENED. I start to cry and finally realize that at this stage in the game I've run out of games and am ready to give up. Instead, I'm cheering myself up tremendously by writing this review. (And if anyone has good suggestions, I'm all ears. Otherwise, we'll go back to Broadcom with Mr. Hub.)