I want to be able to use the Home Control Buttons on my Harmony Remote (Home companion version). They can only be attached to smart home devices so the only method I can find for HA is the use the hue emulation.
I want to enable hue emulation so I can use the Home Control Buttons on my Harmony but I don’t want the devices exposed to Alexa because they already are through both actual Hue Hub an HA.
The Actual Hue Hub has a button to make it reachable. Does the emulation have the ability to disable the discovery after you have connected.
So for example if I configure it to expose by default false and only expose a few devices for my Harmony, then after connecting my harmony buttons to the devices I remove them from being exposed will it still work? I expect not but perhaps it would.
Is there any other way to connect the Harmony Home Control Buttons to devices? I used to connect them directly to SmartThings but I don’t think a SmartThings emulator exists. Harmony also lists a bunch of thermostats, qivicon home base, august lock, insteon hub, lifx smart bulbs, hunder douclas powerview hub, and computer as options.
Computer is very interesting. I wonder what it needs to see on computer to connect. I could setup a raspberry pi if I knew what it was looking for on the computer. I tried adding a computer as a device and then tried to access the home control buttons but it said I had not home control devices. So not sure why they listed computer in the “Add home control device” section.
Last resort I guess is to allow the duplicate device to get added to Echo and then in the app change the names to something I won’t use. Perhaps folks have found other ways around the duplicate devices issue?
Check out the Roku component. I’m using it and it works well. Only downside is that you cannot dim with the rocker switch the same way as you can with native hue or smartthings dimmers
The solution I just came up with isn’t bad. I created 4 input_boolean and assigned them to the harmony buttons. Then I can do everything else in automation’s. So alexa did get 4 new commands “Turn on Harmony Button 1” … thru 4 but that’s not too bad.
Hmm, I had that remote, now have the ultimate, but same set up. I have a zwave switch set up using one of the home control buttons. I assigned a roku command to the button, and then an automation for that button. It has been a long time since I set it up, but it works perfectly. I actually have a lot of hue bulbs, so I use the native hue integration for 3 of the 4 buttons, and the 4th button is the emulated roku to zwave.
I just looked. You can change what a home control button does in the configuration for the activity. Dont go into home control settings in the Harmony App. go to the activity. Make sure the emulated ROKU is assigned to all activities. I guess the only downside is the buttons would not be active unless you were in an activity.
One of my 4 things I am setting up is hue and I didn’t even think of just using the hue directly, haha. So focused on HA right now.
Maybe it would work with roku I just read that it didn’t work for the home control buttons unless you had the newer or better models. So I didn’t even try.
Thanks for your input. I may give it a try if I have any issues with my current plan. At first input_boolean wasn’t getting discovered but I found that adding them to the include_entities: list in the emulated hue config wasn’t working. I found a thread with instruction on adding config to customize.yaml and that worked.
Launching apps is more about starting netflix, etc on a roku, etc. Anyway, if you add the emulated Roku to an activity like “Watch TV” you can then assign ROKU buttons (play, pause, skip, etc) to the home control buttons. Then use automations based on the roku buttons. I’m 99% sure that will work just fine. What you cannot do is go into the Home control section of the harmony app and assign roku button.
Is there a way to have the Home Control Button always do the same function regardless of whether an activity is running or not? For example, I’d like to have one of the colored home control buttons controls some lights even if there isn’t a harmony activity currently running.
I have emulated hue setup and all the components/groups/scripts etc are showing up in the harmony app. I just don’t see a way to map one of the colored home control buttons to an emulated hue item. What am I missing here?
Yes I have added the “emulated hue” to the Harmony using the Android app. I can see my Home Assistant devices in the Harmony App which is a good sign.
In the android app I go through the following menus which differ slightly from your sequence of menus (I don’t have the same options where we deviate)
Harmony Setup --> add/edit devices/activity --> Remote and Hub --> Harmony Smart Control --> Activity Control Buttons.
Once I am in the Activity Control Buttons section, it only lists the 6 activities associated with the long and short presses of the 3 Activity Buttons (the ones with music/tv/movie icons).
Not Activty Control buttons, you should select “Home Control Buttons”. If you dont have that, I then you dont have a “Smart Home Control” remote.
If that’s the case, I misunderstood. I dont believe you can map 'Smart control" items to non smart control remotes and expect them to work if no activty is active
Yeah, That one will not do what you want. As in it does not have dedicated buttons that work “outside” of activities. This is the cheapest one that does what you want. There are others that do that as well.
You could use the emulated roku to add HA stuff to Activities, which is what I used to do, but it still requires an activity to be running.
Does anyone know if the Hue Emulator will allow you to add emulated lights as well, or is it only the bridge that can be emulated? My goal is to have the Harmony home control buttons trigger a HomeKit scene. If I could create a fake emulated Hue light, that I can use the Harmony to turn on and off, I could create a HomeKit automation on that light to trigger a scene.
Yes, you can add Hue lights to the emulated hue. I currently have 6 hue lights, and one zwave switch added to my emulated hue. The emulated hue is connected to my harmony and I am able to control them all with the hue home control buttons. I do have a apple tv and I do use homekit (barely), but I have a question. I see a lot of posts about creating homekit automations and triggering them via HA, my question is why? Why would you not just do it in HA? Really just curious, maybe i’m missing out.
how can you link an harmony hub to an hue (emulated)?
i always though to use smart zigbee devices with a harmony, you need an harmony remote 950 , or somekind of extension to the hub itself to control zigbee
so where is now the link then between hub and other stuff?
