With Harmony Hub being depreciated, do we expect it to reappear in HACS?

Third party integrations
1

Many of us use and love Harmony Hubs. I note that in the July release support is removed from Core. Do we expect it to migrate to HACS? Whats out future?

2

As far as i saw in the pull request it’s just about switch entities, the remote entities will stay in the integration Remove Harmony switches by joostlek · Pull Request #119206 · home-assistant/core · GitHub

3

Well, since these switches are used for very primary functionality of harmony remote - to turn specific activity on, I do not understand this removal… Yes, select entity can be used instead, but what is reason to make users live more complex?

4

Mirek, could you give us a specific example of turning specific activity on or off? Is that some yaml for automation? Something on the lovelace frontend?

Am also a Harmony user here, but not 100% sure what exactly this switch entity depreciation means to me.

5

@k8gg I yet need to figure it out… Yesterday I tried to remotely update some of my cards to use remote.x instead of switch.x, but upon checking it later this did not worked :frowning:
In general most of my Harmony automations work the other way aroud, using actual remote to control devices and detecting the state of activity to take some actions on other devices. Though I have cards in my dashboard to initiate activities this from UI and these need to be update. I hope to work it out today.

6

Six months ago, when this change was announced, I changed from using the individual sensors to the select entity. You do. ot have to worry that functionality is lost, all things you used to do are still possible, just a bit different. I chose to adopt the new way, but if you want you can create the old sensors yourself using templates.

There’s a whole thread with different kinds of ways to do things with the new select:

7

So, I manage to go through what is possible and frankly speaking had some issues with using the remote.x as I couldn’t manage to get it working… perhaps too much in hurry. So I ended up with recreation of appropriate switches, that seems to be easier to retain all ofthe automations/scripts/cards setup. Here is example of new sewitch to turn on one of activities and another one to power everything off:

- platform: template
  switches:

# remote.tv_room is my Harmony Elite Hub

    tvroomappletv:
      friendly_name: "TV Room Apple TV"
      value_template: "{{ is_state_attr('remote.tv_room', 'current_activity', 'Watch Apple TV') }}"
      turn_on:
        service: remote.turn_on
        data:
          entity_id: remote.tv_room
          activity: 'Watch Apple TV'
      turn_off:
        service: remote.turn_on
        data:
          entity_id: remote.tv_room
          activity: 'PowerOff'

    tvpoweroff:
      friendly_name: "TV Room PowerOff"
      value_template: "{{ is_state_attr('remote.tv_room', 'current_activity', 'PowerOff') }}"
      turn_on:
        service: remote.turn_on
        data:
          entity_id: remote.tv_room
          activity: 'PowerOff'
      turn_off:
        service: remote.turn_off
        data:
          entity_id: remote.tv_room
          activity: 'PowerOff'

Turning on or toggling any of these activities switches turns on related activity. Turning on power off switch switches all devices off.

8

Can you still use the Hub? I hadn’t used mine in years but after recently setting up HA I fired it up to try and control my heat pump via IR. I found that basically every device feature seems to have been removed and I couldn’t see any learning function like before. Am I just blind or was it nerfed to all hell?

9

I’ve been using it for a couple of years now. I have not lost functionality since then, but some things have changed. The most obvious is that in HA there’s now one select instead of multiple switches.

Defining new activities, adding devices or Learning things has never been part of the integration afaik. That needs to be done through the Harmony app, which also still worked for me a month or two ago.

There’s not that much visible in HA though, the selector is used to pick the activity, and there is a remote service to sends specific remote commands.

10

Ahh sorry for not being clear. I meant the functionality in the Harmony app seems to have completely changed and removed a tonne of functionality. I’m probably talking maybe 3 years ago that I stopped using it.