Actions not showing in Harmony Hub Control

I love ST and very passionate about it. I admire @ben, @tyler, @urman, Charlie, Blake and what they stand for and believe me when I say you guys are my only friends and family in this land of ours (except of course my missus). This community has actually saved my life. I mean literally from a total collapse. I share everything in here coz this is all I have got.

Guess, it is time for me to stop ranting and add that sonos not working, hues not working, aeon outlets for my Christmas tree not working, harmony not working, hello homes not working while switching off all lights, dashboard crashing every few minutes, presence gone crazy with geofencesā€¦ How many tickets do I openā€¦ My wife is not talking to me coz every freaking day after workā€¦ I am trying to fix things and defend ST and hundreds of dollars spent.

Over time DropCam brings my network down with a broadcast storm when I bridge my wireless with my LAN. I have to give something up to get my Harmony interface.

What do you mean by bridging your wireless with your LAN?

Sorry, I didnā€™t explain my issue. Iā€™m using a wireless mesh and suffice it to say I have to keep my wireless separate from my wired network. Almost everything wireless nowadays goes through the cloud so it hasnā€™t been an much of an issue till now.

First off, wow, Thanks for the kind words. We want to live up to them.

So onto thisā€¦

I donā€™t think opening more than the (large number of) support tickets you already have will do any good. Your setup just sounds awful. There is no reason you should be having all those issues. We would never put up with that in our own homes and neither should you.

Not sure how many devices you have and what other environmental variables you have going on, but I would want to tear it all down and rebuild it (I know more nights and weekends with the wife glaring at you).

We are starting to really see some patterns that lead to radio interference. SONOS and hue for example, can sometimes not play nice with each other. We have also seen our own ZigBee radios knocked around by access points and Apple TVā€™s. And then there is what your neighbors might have going on if you live in close proximity.

While this all seems like science I am wondering more and more if there is an art to placement of all these devices throughout a home.

@Ben

Iā€™m pleased that you are taking this seriously. People flagged me as a crazy when I posted on Amazon that Sonos was causing interference and vice versa. I have many repeatable cases, some Iā€™ve posted in other threads.

Iā€™m also pleased you recognize the parameters involved are not linear. In other words two apparent exact scenarios do not produce the same effect. Even if a device is in line of sight a metal cabinet oblique to a signal can impact transmission for example. As you say, it seems to be an art rather than science.

Finally, that brings me to my other pet peeve which now should be apparent. Can you please expose the mesh routing table with radio signal strength? If us users can see this then we can save you a lot of support.

For the most part, SmartThings is very much an enthusiast level and up product. This stuff is not plug and play at this point. I would wager that in the setups that do work, you will find a higher level networking gear underneath. Networking is still complicated and the equipment that your isp gives you is meant to support 5-10 devices. On higher end wifi gear you will find a setting that reduces interference with bluetooth and other devices that might bump into 2.4ghz as well.

From my router docs:
Bluetooth Coexistence Mode
An 802.11 device and Bluetooth can interfere with each other when the 802.11 device operates on the 2.4 GHz band. All Bluetooth devices operate at the 2.4 GHz band. If you experience wireless disconnects, decreased range or speed, and other connectivity issues when you turn on some of your Bluetooth devices, try to change this option to ā€œEnableā€ (this will make the router and Bluetooth device to take turns in using the spectrum for communication) or ā€œPreemptionā€ (the router will inform the Bluetooth device about the channel it is operating on, and the Bluetooth device can preemptively disable communication on the respective Bluetooth channels). Please note that this option requires your Bluetooth device to ā€œcooperateā€. If the Bluetooth device doesnā€™t implement the coexistence techniques, using this option will have no effect.

Thanks Tyler.

I did email support and did get a response saying the port # had been edited. Unfortunately, it didnā€™t work so Iā€™m still unable to trigger Harmony activities from SmartThings.

What was the port # suggestion, or is it specific to each userā€™s device setup?

The email I got from ST support said they ā€œchanged the harmony port from 8088.0 to 8088ā€

Mine already shows as 8088 in the device data field. That does not seem to be the problem for me. Yet nothing in ST is able to trigger any Harmony actions. This is the 3rd or 4th time I have experienced a failure of this sort. The last few times I had to delete and start from scratch. Not going to bother anymore.

Harmony has no issues controlling ST devices which at least gives back half of the advertised functionality.

Any updates on this? Iā€™m having the same problem, running the newest firmware for the logitech hubā€¦ I can get IFTTT to control logitech activities via the net, so that looks clean.

The support staff tried doing the port change on my hub a couple of times, but so far that hasnā€™t workedā€¦

I too canā€™t get ST SmartApp Harmony Control to find the Harmony hub in setup, while the ST SmartApp Harmony Connect has no problems finding the Harmony hub. I can control ST from Harmony without any problems but cannot seem to setup ST to control Harmony hub.

My details:
Harmony Hub firmware 4.2.48
ST hub up-to-date as of 1/3/2015
Nexus 5 on Lollipop 5.0.1

Interesting, Iā€™ve not tried this, so I thought I would.
Added Harmony control, selected my hub, selected a few modes, an existing harmony activity and one zwave switch.
Turned the switch on, activity started, no issues.
Harmony Hub FW: 4.2.48
Harmony app: 4.0.4

I can tell you that when I was setting up the Harmony hub initially several months ago, it did not do well connection wise when my router was set to auto channel selection. Now maybe Harmony has fixed this, but when the router was on auto, the Harmony hub would connect (green), then disconnect and stay disconnected (red).
I flipped my router to a static channel setting (which is a wise thing to do anyway), the Hubs been fine ever since.
The other thing you must do is configure a static lease IP address for the Harmony hub, you do not want the ip address changing after itā€™s setup.

If ST canā€™t find the hub, then the device settings in the Harmony Device are probably not the current ip address that the Hub is using. Have a look at the data component, this is mine:
[mac:000420EEDEE8, ip:192.168.1.204, port:8088]
If you canā€™t ping the ip address thatā€™s listed for your harmony hub, then the app wonā€™t work.

So I can confirm without a doubt that harmony <ā€“> ST control works bi-directionally.
If itā€™s not working, thereā€™s likely issues on your network that are ganking things up.

Iā€™m getting the same result. For some reason itā€™s not working with a virtual switch, but does work with a real light.

Yea, that canā€™t have anything to do with the harmony integration, Neither ST nor Harmony can tell the difference between a virtual and a real switch. Iā€™ve got virtual switches in ST that I include in Harmony activities, I can think of no reason the reverse wouldnā€™t work, donā€™t think that problem is related to the harmony app.

Youā€™re right. My stupid mistake. Had a device type selected that didnā€™t publish itā€™s events, so Harmony Connect had nothing to respond to. Itā€™s all working now.

@thegibertchan - just wanted to let you know this seems to be fully working for some of us.

You are the lucky fews. It does ā€œNOTā€ work for majority of us. We do realize that itā€™s still in the labs. As for the unfortunate ones, we cannot even add the hub to our ā€œthingsā€ as was stated earlier.

Me personally I donā€™t care about the integration as I only use the harmony for A/V functions but there are plenty in the community who would really appreciate the integration and bought the harmony homes thinking that the integration will work at some point.

Ron, I donā€™t think in my case luck has anything to do with it.
I know you read my post on home networking tips, this thread (and maybe another one) were the incentive to spend the time on that.
Anyway, software is software, and since the latest software works for some of us, that only leaves hardware/networking issues as the differences between the haves and the have nots.
Maybe the have nots are stuck in some networking edge case, that should be handled by the software but isnā€™t, I donā€™t know.

All I can tell you is how my net is set up, and that the integration is not universally broken.
If it works for me, and a few others, thereā€™s no reason it canā€™t work for everyone thatā€™s having issues.

Unfortunately, this is one of those crossover areas, where does ST/Harmony support end?, whoā€™s ultimately responsible for my home network?, How many edge cases exist, and how many of these is ST/Harmony responsible for?

@Mike_Maxwell please donā€™t get me wrong. I am not at all complaining. :slight_smile: just trying to point out that after the latest harmony update, you will not be able to use the integration if you have not already had the hub recognized in the app. It used to work fine for me too but i was stupid enough to remove it for some reason. And I honestly I donā€™t use harmony with ST and donā€™t even intend to.

And if someone claims and sells the integration, they are very much responsible. Not all users of this integration is going to be creating virtual switches, IFTTT triggers and what not.

And as far as it if it works for you and there is no reason it should not work for othersā€¦ We are all not geniuses. Some of us are just plain and simple users.