Hi everyone! I’m a Newbie to Smartthings itself as my first Smartthings will be the V2 that I pre ordered last week.
The reason I ordered one is because I already have 2 x Echo’s(Alexa’s) 4 x Sonos Speakers, The Harmony Ultimate remote and some Hue Bulbs.
From what I thought since these all integrate thru the Smartthings Hub once I have them activated in the Smartthings Hub I could just issue voice commands to my echo and it would just work.
For example.
Right now one of my activities in my Harmony is watch DirecTV.
This turns on my TV, Turns to the correct input, then turns on my receiver, sets the correct input and turns on the DirecTV.
I thought once all setup within the Smartthings Hub all I would have to do is say “Alexa, Turn on DirecTV”
But from what I’ve been reading here is that is not true. I’ll have to setup some IFTTT recipies and some things within the Smartthings app.
I’m not slamming at all I just want to know what I will need to do after setting up the Smartthings Hub once it get’s here.
Thank you for any insight, it is most appreciated.
Amazon echo can ask SmartThings to perform specific actions, like turn on a switch.
Harmony can ask smartthings to perform specific actions, like turn on a switch.
But in the current general release version of the harmony/SmartThings integration, Smartthings cannot ask harmony to perform a specific action directly.
So there is no way right now to flip a switch controlled by smartthings and have harmony react to that.
However, both smartthings and harmony have IFTTT channels. So IFTTT can react when a switch controlled by smartthings changes from off to on, and IFTTT can then tell Harmony to perform a specific action.
This is why we call IFTTT "the man in the middle. "
It may be that in the future we have more features in the direct harmony/SmartThings integration to allow smartthings to make requests directly of harmony. If that day comes, we won’t need IFTTT in the middle anymore.
You have all your harmony activities already existing in harmony.
Using the current integration, what you need to do is add one virtual switch to smartthings for each harmony activity that you want to control from Echo.
Plus one more switch as a power off option.
Then, you add one IFTTT recipe for each of those new switches, to tell Harmony what to do when smartthings turns that switch on.
So you tell echo to turn an activity on, like “turn the DVD on.”
Echo tells smartthings to turn on the virtual DVD control switch.
Smartthings turns on the virtual DVD control switch.
When IFTTT sees that the virtual DVD control switch came on, it tells harmony to start the “watch DVD” activity.
Harmony starts the “watch DVD” activity. The same “watch DVD” activity you had before you ever started setting up smartthings.
It sounds like a lot, but you only have to set it up once, and after that when you tell echo to do something everything typically happens in a second or two. Seriously, my TV comes on faster with the voice command than it does if I try to press the button on the Harmony remote.
Ok @JDRoberts, so far so good. I mimicked your setup exactly now. Now, we just need to get “Alexa, put on ESPN” working! (I know we can do this by having an activity for each channel, would be way too much configuration and work).
I could definitely see setting up two or three favorite channels with their own harmony activity, and their own voice command. I did that before when I was still using Siri. it would also be really good if you had kids: “Alexa, turn on the Disney Channel” or whatever.
@JDRoberts You have guided me towards the path of having hundreds of recipes and activities, but it is pretty damn cool. Just setup “Alexa, watch Nick Jr.” for my son. Now for ESPN, and all my channels This is by far the best integration to date with SmartThings. It uses 4 different technologies all seamlessly working together. IOT at its finest.
After spending the last 90 minutes programming about 8 Harmony Activities, IFTTT recipes and virtual switches, I came across a Harmony bug where it loses it setting for the starting channel. The first one worked (Nick Jr), but now all of them are gone. I’ve tried to re-add them to each activity and sync after each one and they lose their settings all over again. Very frustrating!
EDIT: To get around this bug, instead of using the “Starting Channel”, just add a command to the start activity with the channel number. It now works great! See my things screen for this setup as well.
Glad to hear you found a workaround! I have previously been told about harmony that you need to only make a few changes at a time, because it does some internal refresh which can lose changes. That might be a different thing than what you ran into though.
I actually did a manual sync after each activity edit and I still lost all the settings except for one activity. It seems to be an issue with multiple activities using Favorites/Starting Channel from the same source.
You guys are killing me!!! I just spent $60 on a 3 way switch for my kitchen last week, waiting to see whats happening with the V2 hub and now I want to hit up BB for the Harmony Hub.
I told my wife the cool thing about this (SmatThings) is I can buy stuff here and there to keep the cost down…its a struggle!
I bought 3 hubs and elected for the simple remote. I couldn’t justifying spending more for the fancy remote when we have automation and smartphones now They were $350 at the time, looks like you got yourself a better deal.
I am debating on just buying the hub for now to work side by side with my existing remotes. We already have a One and 900 that work and the new touch remote does not have the same layout as the 900 or One. I have to tread lightly with making changes especially when it comes to the TV remote
I assume I can buy just the hub and later add either the standard remote or the touch screen one, right?
