I just replaced our TV setup. In the old one, Harmony synchronized everything and had the nice side benefit of exposing its state to Hubitat. It was tied into a few Rule Machine rules.
I now have an LG WebOS TV, an Nvidia Shield Pro, and a Sony Blu-ray player. In this new setup, we don't really need Harmony for much - two activities, two remotes, both control the TV by HDMI-CEC; each activity is a single remote. Except....
I haven't found a way to monitor the state from Hubitat. Is there a way to get state from any of these devices without bringing back Harmony?
The USB ports on my TV only have power when the TV is on, so I put together a 5V relay connected to a dry contact sensor (same concept for monitoring power loss). It works quite well, but nowadays power monitoring plugs are plentiful and affordable, so that’s probably the option I’d go with today.
Just make sure you get a power monitoring plug that either returns to the previous state after a power loss or has a settable default state. Either that, or you have to remember to turn it back on after a power outage.
Thanks, all! I got some power-monitoring plugs and found a value that mostly works. Although, funnily enough: The TV is OLED, which means it's power consumption varies noticeably with the visual content. One time, it sat on a mostly-black screen long enough that the power dropped and triggered the "TV Off" branch of my rule, before a new picture shunted it back to Movie Mode!
Just set the trigger value to a few watts above the power off value. And you need to set the power reporting value at 5 watts. (In the device preferences)
I put the plug on the power strip for the TV, Shield, and Blu-ray player together, but the Shield sometimes spins up when off. But now that I think again, the meter could be after the power strip and measure only the TV, which should be far more reliable.
The community driver available for your LG TV which Mark provided does a very good job of not only reporting your on/off state, but pretty much can integrate every function of the tv. The power on issue has also been resolved. It's probably the best TV integration out there. Volume, menu, inputs, navigation. I found this to be very useful, all but eliminating my need for harmony
Hey, @marktheknife and @stevkevdyl, just wanted to say that I finally got around to switching over to the TV driver. It does a great job of detecting when the TV turns on -- and perhaps better than the power monitor, not having false detections of turning off when the screen is dark for more than a few seconds. I also really like that I can have the volume get reset to a tolerable level when my son turns it on early in the morning.
However, the delay in detecting that the TV has turned off is considerable -- typically tens of seconds, sometimes as much as a minute. From looking at the code, it seems like it expects a message from the TV when it turns off, so I would expect it to be fairly prompt. Is there something I need to tweak?
