Hi all. I have several IR controlled blinds that I am trying to control more precisely with my Harmony Hub through HA.
First a little background. There are up and down buttons on the remote for tilting the blinds. A single press and release on either button causes the blinds to rapidly move from tilted completely one way to completely tilted the other way. A long press on either button causes the blinds to slowly tilt until the button is released and then they stop moving. I would like to use this long press command to tilt the blinds open a specific way.
I have learned the remote in the Harmony app on Android. The up and down buttons are there and behave the same as the physical remote.
Short press = rapidly tilt until closed or stopped.
Press and hold = slowly tilt until button is release
The problem is I cannot get HA to replicate the press and hold action of the remote. I am assuming that I just have to send the command a number of time in rapid succession for it to seem like a long press to the blinds.
When I hold the down button in the app I see the status light on the harmony hub flashing fairly quickly as it sends the commands.
When I try to send the following to the remote.send service, it doesn’t seem to send every .2 seconds.
{ “entity_id”: “remote.harmony_hub”, “device”: “54340687”, “command”: “DirectionDown”, “num_repeats”: “10”, “delay_secs”: “.2” }
I see the status light flash 10 times on the hub, but it isn’t any faster than if I send the command without a delay parameter. According to the description for the delay_secs parameter the default delay is .4 seconds. I would expect it to be twice as fast if I set it to .2 seconds. However the status LED on the hub does not flash any faster. I can make the delay longer than .4 seconds so I know I have the syntax correct and the parameter is getting sent correctly. I bumped it up to 5 seconds at one point just to be sure and did see 5 seconds between flashes of the LED on the hub.
So what am I missing? Is there some kind of minimum delay in HA? Is there a rate limit for sending commands to the Harmony Hub? Is there “press and hold” command for the Harmony Hub that behaves differently than a single button press?
Sorry for the long post. I’m banging my head against the wall with this one.