You can thank phillips hue for not allowing that. It’s not HA’s fault. Hue closed the gen2 API and made it impossible to emulate.
I cannot argue with you on that - I only know that OH2’s add-on works (and it seems to emulate the later API - since you have an config option to emulate a v1 if you need it). It also allows you to virtually push the hub button (which HA add-on doesn’t).
No, I use this currently as a replacement for hue… You just don’t understand how it works.
You’re right I don’t - so why don’t you explain it to me? I literally just checked to see if I could assign something other than home control devices to the home control buttons on my remote and the Harmony software/app says I CANNOT.
Openhabs hue emulation will have the same issues if harmony stops working with gen 1 hues. This is not home assistant’s doing. This is other companies (Hue, logitech). Unfortunately, we are at their mercy.
Again, I can only tell you what I know is working now… and OH2’s Hue emulation is working perfectly with all the apps and Harmony’s smart hub without issue.
Sorry about this replies, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use this horrible forum software to properly quote you.
Connect to the integration through harmony as a Roku Device.
Use it however you want. To test, select the device and press ANY button on the remote.
(For testing only) Following the documentation for emulated roku, see how the event is shaped. Simply subscribe to the event in the dev_tools event page. Whenever a button, any button, on the remote is pressed when the device is active (in an activity or the device is selected) That event will occur in home assistant and you can execute actions off of it.
Make your automation to do whatever you want in HA using the event that is fired in home assistant.
Don’t click home control buttons, click device control buttons. The same buttons that are available under home control buttons are available under device control buttons. Also these buttons by default send events through the event pipe. You don’t even need to assign any actions to them because the events just appear in HA.
It’s really easy to use… it’s also the same forum that openhab uses.
Thank you very much - I will try everything you’ve just said above!
You’re right it is, and many others use this software - I’m just so used to older forum software - pressing the ‘quote’ button in the tool bar adds confusion as it’s similar (to say BB code) but breaks the minute I edit it
It’s called Discourse. There’s a tutorial buried somewhere on here. Took me all of 10 minutes to do a few years back and you get a nice badge for it (if you care about that).
Sorry back to Emulated Roku and Harmony - I have just now been able to assign the device buttons as you indicated above.
But I wanted to clarify - will the harmony allow me to (re)use the + and - buttons for each separate light/switch just like the original home control would? If yes, I guess this would require some extensive scripting in HA (or Nodered?) to bring all this functionality together?
You assign lights/dimmers, etc to your 4 buttons around the +/-, once you’ve selected the device if it was a dimmer you could then use +/- to adjust brightness.
This of course was handled by the Harmony automatically (via Hue integration).
Ah, Yes, you’d have to handle this logic in home assistant.
Make an input_select. When button a is pressed (event fires), set the input_select to the entity_id you want to target.
Then when the + or - events fire, just use the brightness_step_pct attribute for the light.turn_on service to increase or decrease the current brightness.
Thanks so much for all the feedback. Seems I might have some kind of mDNS issue as there have been a lot of UniFi updates lately and my Harmony can’t ‘see’ the emulated Roku either so if it can’t see that, it won’t see the emulated hue either.
I honestly have a hard time believing that emulated_hue API just stopped working. It seems like some people have had luck as soon as a just a few months ago with getting it to work with Harmony.
There must be more to this, is there any OLD Hue application that can be used to test if this is really a depreciated API issue or if it is something else that is broken?
I get that it’s possible with a lot of work to work around it with emulated_roku but I feel like such major work arounds for something that should really work out of the box is really a last resort situation. From plenty of reading it seems like it’s not emulated_hue that is the issue but rather maybe networking, or some other configuration or conflict that might be the cause of this breaking down.
If anyone has any further ideas that would help! I’ve turned on debugging in the logs, unfortunately I cannot seem to find anything wrong. On HA’s side everything seems to work, however it seems like nothing I’ve tried so far is able to see the emulated_hue hub.
DIYHUE loaded into a docker container on a separate host seems to work with HA (instantly notifying that there is a Hue hub available) and other apps work too. While I understand it isn’t the same emulated implementation - it does show (together with OH2 plugin I was using just a few weeks ago) that the api’s out there right now DO work (v1 or otherwise).
Seems like a good idea to replace it with something that works then
In any event I’d still like to look into this some more - so if you happen to know of any diagnostic avenues I should be looking at do let me know.
Worst case maybe I can somehow come up with a solution that would let me use Openhab’s Hue Emulator to deal with the few light/groups I need to deal with - it still seems simpler doing that than having to make some elaborate thing with roku emulation + scripting to make use of the +/- buttons on the Smart Remote.
I’m actually quite surprised that this isn’t more of a thing/issue considering how popular the Harmony hub and remotes are with home automation and the lighting/home automation buttons really work so well in that situation (IMO).
Jumping into this thread. Saw your instructions above. I suspect that you have an Elite or Ultimate remote?
Using the companion and adding the emulated Roku in Harmony it doesn’t seem to work.
I added Roku to an activity, if I select the customize remote, the home control buttons (ligtbulbs and power outlets and + / -) don’t show so can’t select. If i listen to roku_command from dev tools nothing happens when these buttons are pressed either. So can’t just go around it from event triggers either.
So my guess is that emulated roku won’t work with the companion.
Saw now that there is a Hass Emulated Hue (I thought this was the same as the Emulated Hue) which is actually emulates a V2 bridge. Got it running and it immediately exposed all my zwave lights in the harmony app. However it does not show switches and scripts and input_boolean like the “old”/original emulated hue can do. I have never used “light template” before, but would it be possible to make switches, scripts and input_boolean to lights using that to get it picked up by the emulation and harmony?
Editing and answering my own post:
Yes light templates for controlling input_booleans was quiet simple to do.
The new Hass Emulated Hue picks the “new lights” up automatically and my Harmony Companion Rremote can use the home control buttons to control lights, scripts, covers via input_booleans.
So happy to get things working Lets just hope the emulator is stable unlike the old one.
Can you share how you it working with Hass Emulated Hue? I can never get the connection in Hue app working and therefor neither in Alexa, it either asks for Update which then fails or just specifies hue not found.
I am running hassio on virtual box and tried both mac addresses for hue - vbox and the wifi shared connection - in both situations hub is found but cant get Alexa to enable the skill
Unfortunately I am to no help in that department.
I don’t have any HUE lights at all, so I don’t use the Hue app.
My only use of it is to get my Harmony Companion remote to work with the home control buttons. But have you made sure to have latest version? It seems like they release new ones quiet often?
Lets just hope the emulator is stable unlike the old one.