Harmony hub clear activity

Configuration
1

Is there a way to clear the current activity with the harmony hub?

We have power saving features on our media PC and TV they turn off after an hour if they are not being used.

The issue is when this happens, the harmony hub doesn’t know they turned themselves of so it stays on the current activity, starting the activity to wake up won’t work, because it thinks they are already on.

Ideally I’d like to clear the activity without “power off” because our TV only has a toggle, so poweroff would turn the TV back on again.

2

There’s no way to do that from the harmony api. I recommend re evaluating using activities if you have devices that shut themselves off

3

Would it be possible to disable the power saving features of the tv/media pc and use Home Assistant to automate something resembling those features back in? Being a pc, I’d assume it’d be easy even without changing its power save feature to work around the issue on that device. The toggle-only tv is a bit of a pickle though.

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4

One solution I can think off is to somehow monitor TV or PC and once you know that these are off by timeout, send Poweroff to harmony. This should not affect devices as these are already powered off, but would sync harmony status to reality… Obviously this solution depends on capability of HA to monitor your particular devices (e.g. having appropriate integration).

5

I thought about that, but the harmony doesn’t know the TV is powered off, so it will send the power toggle, and turn the TV back on

6

Sounds like you need to disable those power saving features and instead have ha tell harmony to turn everything off.
Are you sure there are no discrete power on & off commands?

7

Yeah, There’s On, Off and Toggle, all of those commands do exactly the same, which is toggle :frowning:

I suppose if could find a way to report the PC idle time to HA, as you said i could trigger the poweroff from HA

8

Yeah this is what I’d do. If the TV and PC can’t use discrete power commands, you’re better off just letting HA and Harmony handle your power saving.

9

so OFF command turns it ON ? (when it has turned itself off)

depending on tv make etc, you could consider device presence detection approach. when their IP addresses no longer respond on the network, consider them off. Then you know state and know what to do

10

thank you i might try that, but in the past i have found the IP method slow to respond. but I have setup an emulated roku, so now the TV turns off with an Android TV ADB command which means it can’t be accidently turned on, so there’s a starting point.

i have also setup the harmony to turn off any activity at 1 am, so the remote is clear for the start of the next day at least.

and i have added a button to harmony remote which will wake everything up if they so go sleep by themselves for whatever reason.

The TV has a eco setting which can’t be disabled it will ask for input after 8 hours of being on with no input, then turn itself after 5 mins.