I’m one of those folks living on borrowed time with my Harmony Hub Remote, and I’ve been looking for awhile for something to replace it. After trying a couple of vended hardware solutions, I finally gave up and decided to do something to use the little RF remote that came with my Vero 4k+. It’s one of those remotes that pairs with a USB key and is basically just a HID keyboard.
My final solution uses an Adafruit RP2040 USB Host Feather with an Airlift Featherwing (for WiFi) to grab the keypress code from the remote, figure out if it’s a short or long press, and then send that via MQTT to a sensor in HA. The code and physical build instructions are available here:
I also did a version of this to run on a Raspberry Pi. I actually did this one first but didn’t like it as much (it depends on a Python module that isn’t really being maintained anymore). It’s easier to setup than the RP2040 version though:
This is similar in concept to the project mentioned here, although mine does all the short/long press logic in the script rather than HA:
That requires you to have access to a USB port on the device on which you are running HA. I’m running it on a Synology NAS in Docker, and it requires hacky things to get a driver running that will allow you to pass the USB device to the Docker container. Also, my NAS is nowhere near where I need the remote. As in I doubt even the RF signal from the remote would make it to the key.
Every time I thought about adding it that way, I kept finding posts talking about how you needed to do a bunch of stuff to load a driver on the Synology. I’m now realizing those posts were talking about adding Zwave/Zigbee sticks. I went ahead and gave your suggestion a whirl (plus the other things that were mentioned in the documentation for the keyboard remote integration, and I was able to see my dongle. A quick test shows my NAS is actually in range for the remote, so I took another look at things.
It took awhile for me to realize that my remote is reporting on two different events, but I did manage to get something working. And I found another post that helped me setup a binary sensor for key press/release that made it easy to integrate into the HA work I’d already done (including figuring out short/long press). If I had a second remote for another room the keyboard remote integration might not be an option (unless I add a USB hub to the NAS), but that’s a problem to solve the day I actually have two TVs in the house.
Anyway, I added this option to the docs on the Ardunio code I wrote:
You might have noticed, in the post of mine that I linked above, that I went the extra mile to mimic the Harmony “activities” concept with a (rough) custom component of mine.
