I’m new to HA and I’m trying to get rid of my dependency on Homebridge (moving everything over to Home Assistant). As part of this process I’d like to expose the various activities that are on my Harmony Hub (remote control) to Homebridge.
I tried initially setting up a filter that would just show remotes but nothing showed in the Apple Home App so I removed the filter and ran with the most basic settings; my Harmony Hub activities still don’t show in the Home app.
I have this working with Homebridge but I would love to ditch that system an move fully over to Home Assistant if it’s at all possible.
Any suggestions? I will admit that I’m brand new to all of this so it’s certainly possible I’m missing something (I’m not even really sure how to get my Harmony activities to show in the HA web interface…)
To be honest the Homekit UI is not the best - the Lovelace UI can do much more. The only reason why I would export devices to homekit is to benefit from the Siri voice control.
You may be able to manually model devices that are yet unsupported by homekit into something that actually is supported by homekit and then export those. Examples:
-Represent each Harmony Hub Activity as an input_boolean, Homekit will then give you a switch to turn an activity on. However, you also then need to write automations to turn off other HH activity booleans if the user activates another input_boolean and to execute the corresponding HH activity using the remote. I am doing it this way and it works flawlessly. You can then use Siri by saying e.g. “Hey Siri, turn on the tv”.
-Represent the volume slider of an AV Receiver as a dimmable light and use service calls for the mediaplayer of the AV Receiver to set the volume according to the brightness of the “light”. -> “Siri, set the amplifier to 60%” works.
I actually decided to set this up again recently (after learning a lot more about Home Assistant). At the time the default activity feature didn’t seem to work for me but it does now.
Once a default activity is configured the remote is exposed as a boolean switch in Lovelace. You can then expose that switch to HomeKit and control it via your HomeKit clients. I was just worried about being able to turn the entertainment system off (as my kids always forget) so it works perfectly for me.
