Harmony with AppleTV & Hubitat

I am trying to create, what I thought would have been a simple function. From a HE rule I want to turn on the TV, Bose Soundtouch and AppleTV, select an app on the AppleTV and have it "play" the content while we are away from home to make it look like we are there. I purchased a Harmony Hub, installed the Harmony integration for HE, and added the components to the Harmony. I can get the Harmony to power on the devices, unreliably but it works sometimes. But I cannot figure out how to make it move down on the AppleTV and select the app to play. Does anybody have any experience with Harmony that can help? The Harmony's setup leaves something to be desired as far as intuitive setup and use.

You can get the Harmony activity to start with @ogiewon ‘s driver found here

You can, with careful creation of a rule using custom actions, manipulate the harmony interface and select an item. But you would need to make sure the Apple TV always returns to menu first, and goes to a specific location before moving to your video app and opening it. In other words you can only do this with button pushes, not direct communication to the Apple TV. The driver isn’t going to know where it is, it’s just going to press buttons in the Harmony interface. Since Apple TV only sleeps it never actually turns off, when you press the menu button and hold for example to return to the main menu, it doesn’t always go back to the same location on the screen. It returns to the app you were last using.

So chances of this working correctly all the time will require the selection of a “home” position first.

Another thought is to instead use Harmony Alexa skill (The second one - there are two). With that skill, you can often say things like “Alexa, tell Harmony to....” and you add the command. There are favorites options on Harmony, but I’m not sure they work for anything other than TV channels ( That’s all I’ve ever used them for). You might be able to use one of those. They are added as scenes to the Alexa app if I remember right, and the Harmony Second remote Alexa app can control them.

If that works by voice, then you might be able to control it with an Alexa Routine custom command.

Thanks, I already have @ogiewon 's driver installed. I know this is probably a dumb question but... what do you mean by "custom actions". I see the selections for the Harmony hub in the device that was created, but how do you activate the actions? I can manually push the buttons on the device selection and add them in dashboards but how to you select those items in a rule?

I just checked my Apple TV, and pressing "Home" twice, would make sure that you end up at the top left App on the TV. Then you can add those actions via the "Customize this activity" option.

Then add the steps you want to, to execute the app you want :slight_smile:

Where do you see that interface? My interface on my iPad looks archaic compared to your screen shots. Also mine will on allow me to add 8 total in the sequence.

This is something you can do in Rule Machine if you’re not able to do it in the Harmony app on your iPad, or the My Harmony application for Windows or Mac as @Royski is suggesting.

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I have the Harmony software on my PC.

Ah okay. It no longer works on macOS Catalina and above.... so I have to use it on iOS

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Ah bummer, certainly makes it easier :frowning:

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Ah crap. Didn’t think about that when I updated to Big Sur. Oh well, that’s why I kept an external drive handy for booting into Mojave.

What about using the Homebridge to Harmony bridge to control it?

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