Harmony Activity Button Press

Third party integrations
1

Any way to trigger automation from a button press within an activity? For example when I’m in the activity “Watch TV”, I’d like to press “mute” and have the lights turn on.

I didn’t see a way to do that here:

Thanks in advance

2

I don’t think so because there’s no attribute with a mute state for Harmony. You could alternatively make a mute script in HA which triggers the lights. The problem still would be it would turn lights on for both states (mute on and mute off) and you couldn’t do it from your remote.

The other thing you can consider is, depending on what you use for audio, see if there’s a mute attribute or a way to ping its state. I believe you could do it with a Denon amp for instance.

1 Like
3

Thanks. Is there any way to have HA detect a different remote button press (ex. maybe the DVR button)?

4

Not with the HA native Harmony support at the moment. @Jer78’s suggestion is probably the best if you have a supported AVR and want to keep everything within HA.

If you ran the Maddox Harmony-API, you could do this with MQTT and state topics but I think it could be a lot of work to get it right.

What kind of lights do you have? If they’re Hue or one of the other supported lights you may be able to remap a button in the Harmony itself to do this.

5

Thanks for the quick response. I have zwave lights and a harmony ultimate home plus hub. I currently have the lights going on/off when I select a particular activity. I was hoping to have a button press turn different lights on or off. Over the holidays I tried to do this with the harmony zwave extender but harmony separates extender actions from non extender activities. So I returned the extender and now just control the lights when I change activities. Sure I could get dedicated light buttons if I upgrade to a harmony elite remote, but that’s not an expense I can justify.

6

Just my 2 cents: An idea would be to create a different activity and have a HA script run when the activity runs from the harmony remote.
THis should be possible since HA can detect the current activity, but i guess the only problem is the polling frequency it uses to detect the activity, which would mean that the HA script wont run instantenously.