Repairing my Harmony 650 universal remote

Saturday, December 6th, 2025 at 11:11pm

Almost fifteen years ago I picked up a Logitech Harmony 650 universal remote to control my television, bluray player and whatever other media devices I might have connected. It was easy to setup and I didn’t need to change the config for many years.

Four years ago I found that my television could no longer play media using new codecs, so I switched over to a Raspberry Pi running Kodi. I was glad that I was able to reconfigure the Harmony 650 to add an MCE remote which the Kodi supported.

A year ago that original television died and I replaced it with another Samsung mainly because of what was available at a decent price. I mentioned at the time that the remote included with the new television was unusable, but fortunately the remote from the old Samsung television still worked, and which meant I only needed minimal tweaks to the config on the Harmony.

What I never got around to writing about was that a year earlier (so two years ago from now) some of the buttons on the Harmony 650 started to not respond all the time. As this is a really old model I started to look around for a modern replacement. I didn’t want something that required wifi and bluetooth or an app on my phone, I wanted a replacement that mostly used IR. I thought I had found the answer in the Sofabaton U2.

I did not:

  • it is configured via an app on a phone, which a number of times forgot all the previous config so I had to start from scratch
  • there are multiple options for an Windows Media Center remote, some didn’t work at all (so not MCE RC6?) and the ones that did work would be received by Kodi as multiple presses, no matter what config settings I tried
  • the macros and device selection looked promising, but I couldn’t get anything as nice as activities on the Harmony

I didn’t like the Sofabaton and eventually some of the key buttons on the Harmony stopped working, so for the last few months I have been using individual remotes: fifteen year old Samsung television remote, a HP MCE remote I picked up a while ago as a backup

Various remote controls from Samsung, Sony, Logitech, HP and Sofabaton

I don’t know how I didn’t come across this earlier, but I found that you can get replacement button membranes for the Harmony 650 remote (also other remotes).

Logitech Harmony 650 universal remote control and its replacement button membrane

That was my task this afternoon, and now the Harmony is working perfectly. This is what I should have done instead of wasting money on the Sofabaton…

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