I’ve been using Logitech’s SmartThings integration to control my lighting with the home control buttons on my Harmony remote. With Samsung getting ready to kill that, what’s the best workaround you have found to keep using your Harmony remote’s home control buttons? Looks like my options are:
Phillips Hue
Lutron
Insteon
LIFX bulbs
I know I could use a Hue bulb as a hack, by setting the level of the bulb and pulling that into HE, but that’s awfully hackish and I would prefer a better solution than that….which of the other options work well with HE for you?
Is your Harmony remote connected to a Harmony hub or is it the stand-alone remote? If a hub, you should be able to use the HE harmony hub integration to set the buttons to trigger actions in HE. I have mine mapped to activities and certain device commands such as controlling my heat pumps, humidifiers, and lights.
Below. Unless I’m missing something, this connects directly to the Harmony Hub locally and has no dependencies on SmartThings. I have completely decommissioned my SmartThings hub long ago and deleted my account. I have this running 3 Harmony hubs in my house to control my IR heat pumps and humidifiers.
That's my understanding as well, but the home control buttons are the exception. From the first post:
" [UPDATE: September 26, 2022] Please be forewarned that Samsung will be shutting down the old SmartThings Groovy IDE by the end of 2022. This means that the following workaround to use the "Home Control" buttons on some Harmony remotes will no longer be possible. I do NOT recommend anyone add the below functionality to any new installations as it will stop working in the coming months."
Insteon seems on its way out based on other HE forum posts. But Lutron seems like it would work. Question is whether I can create virtual Lutron devices on the Lutron hub and have my zooz zwave light switches follow those Lutron virtual devices….
Anyone familiar with Lutron know what all would be required for Lutron to work for this? The idea would be to control my already installed zooz light switches with my Harmony remote via Lutron. Commands would go from Harmony to Lutron to Hubitat to zooz switches. Can I do that, or would I need to actually get lutron switches (something I don’t want to do)?
I was thinking you could set up a dummy device in your Harmony hub and create device commands using an old IR remote that doesn’t actually do anything. And then you could assign those commands to buttons on your remote. When you press the buttons on the remote, those commands would be picked up by the Harmony HE integration and you could use those in a rule to trigger the lights/switches via HE. I was originally think about picking up the activities in HE through the integration, so I’m not sure that this integration would actually allow you to pick up the individual device commands executed by the Harmony Hub, even though you are able to see them in the integration logs if you turn on debug logging. If not, maybe something that could be added to the integration to allow for this functionality.
As for the Lutron option, I have Lutron devices and the Pro Hub integrated into HE. I don’t see or know of a way to create a virtual Lutron device. You could possibly get away with just a pico remote that has 5 buttons and use those button push and held commands (possibly 10 commands total) to relay. But I haven’t tried this.
Fundamentally, what are you trying to do? Are you committed to having the buttons on your Harmony remote? Like you want to be able to change your TV volume and switch on lights all with your thumb?
Yes. Love my Harmony companion remote, especially the nice form factor that is lost with other bulky remotes. I want to be able to control my already installed zooz zwave light switches with the Harmony remote home control buttons.
I currently have Lutron in a different house than I have my Harmony hubs/remotes, but I have an unused Harmony hub & remote at my house with the Lutron, so I can probably give it a try later this week.
I do not believe Pico Remotes will show up as an available device in the Harmony Hub app, using the Lutron to Harmony integration.
For me, I simply mapped my Lutron dimmers and Hue bulbs to the "Home Control" buttons, using their official integrations with Harmony. Hopefully, it those will work until Logitech decides to eventually shut down the Logitech Harmony servers.
Another option that might be viable is to use Home Assistant, running on a Raspberry Pi, or similar. One would create some sort of virtual dimmer devices in Home Assistant. Then, try getting the Hue emulator running in Home Assistant. This would allow the Logitech Harmony software to see Home Assistant (HA) as a Philips Hue bridge, and thus allow the mapping of those HA virtual buttons to the Logitech Harmony Home Control buttons. Once done, you could use the Home Assistant Device Bridge to bring those virtual dimmers back into Hubitat.
Or, you could use the HE to HA integration, to bring your Zooz dimmers into HA as a virtual devices. Have those then exposed via the Hue emulator in HA to Harmony, and map those to the Harmony Home Control buttons.
Again, I have not tried either of these, but they should work assuming you can get the HA Hue emulator to be seen by the Harmony App.
Hmm. Ok. Bit of work to do then. I have an Odroid running Android for my dashboard already. Will have to explore whether I can plop HA and Hue emulator on that. Or my Synology NAS. Rasp Pi a bit difficult to get at the moment…
Well, I've got HA up and running, as well as Emulated Hue. Having trouble figuring out how to create virtual dimmer devices. HA seems to be a new beast that I'm quite unfamiliar with.... sheesh...
Instead of creating virtual HA devices, you could install the Hubitat to Home Assistant integration. Then you could pass over your Hubitat lights to Home Assistant, and then to Emulated Hue. From there, the Harmony Hub should be able to control them...
