Hi, I’ve been tinkering with Home Assistant for a while now, and there’s something missing that would make my life so much easier: having HA as a Harmony Hub device, so that I could pretty much control anything with a Harmony remote.
I’ve been considering different possibilities and I wanted to see if anyone had already done it or would have a better idea:
Using Emulated Hue, so that switches can be seen by Harmony. Easiest thing to do, but it’s not great because Harmony cannot only assign some particular buttons to light control.
Add Home Assistant as a computer to Harmony, and pair the Harmony Hub to Home Assistant as a bluetooth keyboard, then using Keyboard Remote. It seemed pretty easy at first, but I can’t figure out how to pair anything to Home Assistant. Would love some help with that if it’s possible…
Using an IR receiver and the LIRC integration. But I see that I have to add some libraries with apt-get. Which I think I can’t, because when I SSH, neither sudo nor apt-get are known commands…
Have a proxy raspberry pi that would receive bluetooth keyboard commands from Harmony Hub and call something on the HA Pi in MQTT… Yeah I’m not gonna waste my time on that one
I found the best way for most devices is running lirc on a raspberry pi zero. Add an equivalent device to the harmony and teach lirc the signals, lirc then makes curl commands to the appropriate home assistant device. For most activities you’re not too interested in the device manufacturer only the function it provides.
I’ve also used the emulated Roku for smart speakers that harmony doesn’t support but find it a bit counter intuitive to use a media stick device class for a speaker
I use HA Bridge to achieve this - https://www.bwssystems.com/#/habridge It emulates a Philips Hue Hub and can link your Homeassistant Devices to Harmony. Works quite well once you get it setup, which can take a while to figure out!
If you have the latest Harmony Elite you can use the home automation buttons to dim lights, etc.
E.g. I configured the pause button in the harmony activities to press a specific button on the emulated roku device. In home assistant I catch this button press on the emulated roku and I turn on the lights in the living room to full brightness. The same for the play button to dim the lights again.
Emulated Roku sounds like what I was looking for, thanks ! Like I said, Emulated Hue half works, since Harmony can only command hue appliances at activity startup or via some specific buttons that don’t exist on the Smart Control add-on remote (the one I use the most)