Harmony Questions

I'm new so I may not fully aware of how this forum works so sorry in advance if this has been asked.

I've gone through quite a few of these threads but most are so old and I'm not sure if there's any new information out there. But I'm trying to understand is there any way (Besides running a docker) to control individual Harmony devices on Hubitat or SmartThings?

I know there's a way to connect SmartThings to Hubitat so if that's the way to go, I'll go that route, but I can't seem to figure this thing out.

Also what is the best hub for Harmony?

You are talking about controlling IR devices connected to your the Harmony hub via HE right?

If so use this. It is an old post, but the code was updated March 1 on Github. I use it and it works great! Wife has a "morning" button that turns on lights on dim, turns on the TV, tunes it to fox news, and sets the volume low.

Thanks for the quick reply!

I installed that driver, but it seems to only control activities which are usually just on/off. Unless Hubitat pulls out the individual devices and individual commands and allows us to build rules and actions with those, I haven't been able to find that yet.

That takes a bit more doing.

see this post for details

You can issue device specific commands using my Harmony integration, as long as your willing to do a little work to figure out each ASCII device command. There is a custom command in my Harmony Hub Parent driver that allows one to send device specific commands. In the STATE section of the device, you can see all of your individual device IDs exposed. These IDs are what is needed by the custom device command, along with an ASCII text Harmony command.

While not the most convenient, it works.

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@ogiewon - Sorry still a bit new here, so according to your post you'd setup a rule in Rules Machine, and from there I could add a virtual button ideally link that to some sort of voice command.

Long story short, I'd setup my most common device commands in the rule machine and then setup something to trigger those.

Am I in the realm of being close to what you're saying or am I way off base here.

Please describe what you are trying to accomplish. What voice commands are you trying to issue?

If you want voice control, try linking your Harmony Hub directly to Alexa or Google Home. That would provide the best, native, fully supported integration possible.

Should those integrations fail to accomplish what you would like to do, then there are some options available via Hubitat. We just need to know what device specific commands you would like to issue, and how they would be triggered.

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I'm working on a few projects --- voice control is a part of it, and the only annoying issue is that one Harmony Hub per google household, although there is some workaround that I haven't tried.

The main thing is, I'm building an Android tablet home controller that I can effectively turn into a giant remote control for the whole house. Using some dashboard tools and connecting it to hubitat, I'd like to be able to not just turn on/off certain devices, but use commands like "oscillate" for my dyson fan, or HDMI-3 for my Bedroom TV, ideally within a button interface.

The voice control part is somewhat of an added bonus, but I'm not sure how far Logitechs integration goes with individual device control with Google Home.

Based on what you're describing, I believe the approach you mentioned earlier makes sense, although with maybe a tweak...

If you want both Voice and Dashboard as triggers for RM Rules, I would consider using a 'Virtual Switch' with the Auto-Off feature enabled. This is because Button Devices cannot be Voice Activated, but Switch devices can. The auto-off feature of the Virtual Switch driver allows it to be ready for the next time it is used as a trigger. Just turn it on again either via Voice or the Dashboard, and it automatically will turn itself back off to be ready again.

Then, use the Virtual Switch device as a Trigger in Rule Machine. Have the Action be a Custom Action, where it calls the custom 'deviceCommand()' of the Parent Harmony Hub device. It will need to pass in two parameters to 'deviceCommand( cmd, deviceID)' as strings. The deviceID's can be found on the device details page of the Parent device as shown below, highlighted in yellow near the bottom. The commands are the piece that you'll somehow need to figure out. They are actually buried is some JSON, IIRC. If you're a programmer, then you should be able to tweak the parent driver to expose this JSON and mine the necessary data which is somewhat device specific.

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I use your integration and it works perfectly!!!!

I'm not sure I understand this part?? I just use the command name directly from the harmony app. Also any command you teach your harmony remote, give it a name, and use that on the command line. Seems to work great, I've not had any issues.

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Excellent! Thank you for sharing this! I rarely use the Harmony App on my phone. It makes perfect sense that these commands are exposed in this manner as the phone app uses the same webSockets interface that my driver uses.

@ogiewon you've been extremely helpful and this is a great community. I'll dig a bit into what you said and see if I can build from there.

Thank you so much.

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I'm trying to figure out how to run a custom action like this.. In Rule Machine I'm forced to pick a capability after selecting Custom Action (see screenshot). Does anyone know what I'm missing?

Just choose Actuator from the list, and then you should be able to select the Logitech Harmony Hub Parent device.

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thank you!! I should have updated my post - i tried reading through all of the posts above and eventually found that actuator note.. never would have guessed that on my own though!

After doing this, what is the correct format for the device ID and command parameter when using the deviceCommand action?

They are simply strings.

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