At the moment I have a Harmony Hub + Smart Remote and was considering transitioning towards a cloud-free solution.
It would seem that a Flirc receiver on my HASS.IO box (a Windows box, but I guess I could pass it through to the Virtualbox instance holding that Ubuntu base for HASS.IO) could work with my existing Smart Remote to do everything the Harmony Hub does, so that I could just keep the remote and ditch the hub.
For example, I have DeConz+Conbee integrated into Harmony as a Philips Hue hub. If I add Flirc to the equation (how, btw? I don’t see an official HA integration, just some bits and pieces posted by people), I assume I could create scripts in HA which would enable Harmony remote button pushes to be recognized by HA via Flirc. And since HA is connected with DeConz, I could just add the Zigbee (or whatever other) entities to the script.
What do you think? Feasible?
I just blocked the access to the internet for the harmony remote → no cloud. Is this not an option?
I use the emulated roku together with my harmony remote, this allows me to capture the buttons pressed on the harmony remote in HA and then do whatever I want in HA based on this. E.g. from my system , whenever the play button is pressed, the light in the living room is dimmed and whenever the pause button is pressed the brightness goes to 100%.
You can also take a look at the YIO remote, I backed the project and am planning to replace my Harmony Remote with this one.
That YIO remote looks great, but @ 300 EUR it’s pretty expensive.
What I actually want is for a signal sent from my remote to not have to go through the WiFi-connected Harmony Hub, which just adds unneeded latency (and sometimes - rarely, but it does happen - doesn’t even work on the first button press).
The Harmony app on my phone is also much slower than my locally-accessible HA instance because as far as I understand it needs to go thru the cloud, even though I’m on the same network as the hub.
I don’t actually want to take my remote offline, I’d just like to channel it through HA, replacing the Harmony app with a tab in HA with access to the Flirc blaster, which would thus be completely local.
The app is crap anyway in my opinion 
I only use a tab in HA and the remote itself.
I don’t think this is possible. The harmony remote needs the hub and I don’t think their remote will route traffic through anything else than their own hub.