Hacking the Harmony Home Control buttons

Configuration
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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. :slight_smile:

HomeKit gives you free voice control. You just name the exposed coments the way you would like to call them when talking to Siri.

For me that is the only reason to use homekit. Homekit is so limited that you sometimes have to represent things as something else to make it fit into homekit, e.g. represent the AVR volume as a dimmable light to be able to voice control the sound volume.

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Haven’t seen anyone has pointed you in the right direction but it does say in the documentation you can’t use those shortcut buttons, set them to something like DOWN and UP and it should work fine.

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I originally posted questions regarding these buttons over a year ago. At that time, I had been using HomeKit for a couple of years and had all of my devices and automations in HomeKit. But the more I used HA, the more I realized how great it is and how terrible HomeKit can be. Fast forward to now, and I have removed all devices from HomeKit and migrated to HA. I still port them back through homekit_controller so that I can access them using Siri and so I can access them through the Home app at home or when I am out. But all of my scenes and automations are configured in HA. This is the best of both worlds!

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Thank you. I solved using emulated hue and official hue integration for Harmony Hub :slight_smile:

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No problem, if you ever want to do more with those buttons or use harmony to trigger other events in HA as part of activities etc, definitely give emulated_roku another chance, I’ve found it so much more versatile than emulated_hue when I swapped over years ago.

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Let me give you a few things to consider for getting this done if you have a non-trivial network setup.

Firstly this is the config file for emulated hue:

emulated_hue:
  host_ip: 123.123.123.123
  listen_port: 8300
  advertise_ip: 123.123.123.123
  advertise_port: 8300
  upnp_bind_multicast: true
  off_maps_to_on_domains:
    - script
    - scene
  expose_by_default: true
  exposed_domains:
    - light
    - switch
    - group

123.123.123.123 is the IP of the HASSio VM running on KVM, using br0 as interface.
br0 is the untagged traffic interface on the network 123.123.123.0/24 (numbers changed for editorial reasons).

The pairing should work without problems if you have the harmony hub on the same network as your HASSio machine/VM.

If you have them in different networks, you enter a world of pain, be prepared.
First you need to route multicast traffic back and fourth between these networks, I recommend using smcroute. You will find some information on how to do that with your particular equipment.

Then you need to tell your firewall to increment the TTL of the SSDP packets, otherwise the router will discard them silently. Depending on your fireall you need to look out how to do packet mangling to increase the TTL at least by 1.
IPtables:

iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -d 239.255.255.250 -j TTL --ttl-inc 1

Finally, you may need to open your firewall to allow the SSDP packets to pass from the harmony hub to HASSio.

Allow UDP from Harmony Hub any port, to IP 239.255.255.250, port 1900
Allow UDP from HASSio any port to HarmonyHub any port (DO NOT allow only packets from port 1900 as you might think, HASSio responds from a random port!)

That should do the trick!

Adjusting color temperature does not work well with RGBW lights, they are using the color LEDs then of course, which are much darker. You need proper CCT lights to use the white temperature adjustment properly

Now my question:
-The handheld remote only allows on/off, brightness and white temperature control, but the mobile app also allows color adjustment. The color adjustment does not work for me at all. Any hints what could be wrong here?

However, now my questions:

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