I currently have HE -> Harmony working well e.g. I can activate activities from a virtual switch in HE. However, I'm also looking to do the other way around i.e. to be able to activate a switch from the remote.
Has anyone come up with any creative work arounds? I assume I could use the official smartthings integration / otherhub to control? Any other creative workarounds/ideas?
And as a side question, does the harmony elite remote actually allow you to control smart home devices outside of the context of an activity e.g. can I have activities configured to do things, but then irrespective of what activity I'm in, control hue lights or (ideally HE/SmartThings switches) without needed to switch activities?
Harmony elite has limited IoT integration inbuilt. As far as I know, Hue, Lutron, Nest and LIFX is all.
Yes you can manipulate the device directly from the touch screen, outside of a Harmony activity.
Doesn’t it use the hub? If it does, then there is also ST, Insteon, Wink, August, Hunter Douglas, Ecobee, and Honeywell. That’s the remote to devices. Then there the many things that can control the Harmony hub. For a direct control of devices connected to a hub from the remote (not Activities), it’s ST, Wink, Insteon and Hue only.
Depends. The ST integration to activate ST devices via Activities and the Harmony devices interface from the Harmony hub most definitely is official and supported. Same with Insteon.
The ability for ST to activate Harmony activities and devices, I too am not certain if that is an official integration or not.
Same thing happens with Hubitat Insteon integration I've tired. The reason I don't use it myself.
Voice and a Xiaomi button next to my chair are the way I control harmony and lights.
I've tried so many different variation and all were unreliable but had a very stable setup for the last few weeks.
I'm running node-red on a raspberry pi (node-red-contrib-harmony) and have it wired so I can hit a url to run activities. It's been working flawlessly and very quick.
However, I'm just finding harmony to be a bit too restrictive and I think im going to return it and order a Neeo remote so I can interact a bit more with stuff via urls
I tried a couple myself and had my harmony hub crash every few days as well. I have been using this one for months with no issues but it only allows you turn on/off activities...which was all I needed.
You are going to need to already have a token (I used the one I had setup in Smartthings).