Yes, it is my understanding that you can do that also.
I took a gamble and went with a manufacturer refurb off eBay, we’ll see how it works out. I agree that a smartphone should be able to do what I need it to do, but I’ve currently got a Harmony One and trying to make the transition as easy as possible for the fiancée
@Nashirak is absolutely correct. The issue you are having is not with Smartthings. It is a limitation of Harmony. When you use your remote to turn the system on, Harmony see’s everything as being “On”. If you wife now manually toggles anything off, the system and the remote become out of sync. The only fixes are:
-
Don’t turn things off manually (most obvious lol). If something is manually turned off, manually turn it back on.
-
Use the logitech “Help” button to turn on the TV (or any device that’s off). Once everything comes back on, then you can hit the off button on the harmony to turn the entire system off, which will keep everything in sync.
Thanks for the tips @Jnick. Harmony is the issue however a few post up you can see I fixed the issues using smartthings. Remote now stays in sync no matter how the TV gets turned off or on.
How long does it take for the IFTTT commands to be sent to the Harmony? I preordered the 2.0 with the intent to switch from Vera to ST…I currently have Echo working with the Hue bridge to control my Harmony hub, using Vera scenes as devices for Alexa to discover, works great. I just assumed that ST had the same level of Harmony integration, I guess that’s not the case (yet)? I’ve used IFTTT for other things, and there is always a delay…wouldn’t be good in practice if that delay existed in this recipe.
The delay varies a lot. Unfortunately I think if it tends to be slow for one recipe for you, it may well be slow for other recipes.
For me, I am probably just lucky, but my IFT TT recipes all execute in two or three seconds. It’s just long enough that for a light you notice it, but for something like turn on the TV, it’s as fast as I could press the button on the physical remote.
The good news is that there is a more direct harmony/Smartthings integration in the works. It’s already passed the smartthings beta and it’s been sent over to harmony for their review.
My understanding from comments the beta testers have made on the forums is that it really expands the integration. So it may well be possible that you won’t need IFTTT for the same approach sometime in the future, but no specific timeline on that yet.
Soooo…this is amazing.
What is the cheapest “model” that would allow me to do this? Is the ~$100 “hub” and generic remote compatible with everything being discussed here.
You need a Harmony Hub. I use the Harmony Home Control which is the hub with the simple home remote (no touch screen). It lists at $149, but we got ours on sale at Best Buy for less than that. Today I just checked and it’s on sale for $129. Comes in black or white.
You could make just the voice part work by getting just the harmony home hub (list $99) but I think most people will want the button remote as well.
Ebay has the Harmony Smart Control for $79.95 with free shipping. It’s new and include the hub and remote control. Mine is arriving tomorrow. Hope this help anyone looking to buy one.
So will this only work when you turn on the TV? I did this and the only way to setup a new activity is to have the “Power” button pressed which just turns off the cable box if the tv is already on, or am I missing something?
You should be able to set this up anyway you want to. Different people will have slight variations depending on exactly how they have their home theater wired. For example, I have my TV as the master, and the DVD player and Roku are slaved to it. I keep my set-top box independent, so that when I turn off the DVD and the other devices go off with it, the set-top box stays on so it can continue to record.
Other people will have all the inputs coming to a receiver, and then individual devices to turn on or off.
The key is to set up a harmony activity, whatever you want to call it, which turns off exactly what you want turned off and leaves on exactly what you want left on.
Once you have this activity set up, then you just associate the virtual switch with it through the IFT TT recipe. Or if you are using something else to trigger harmony activities, you use that.
For me, it works best to have a harmony activity who’s in sequence is just turn off the TV. It doesn’t have to turn off anything else because the other devices that I want off are already slave to the TV, and the other devices that I want let left on are not slaved to the TV.
But if it’s easier to keep track of, you can just set up your own harmony activity that just turns off the individual devices you want turned off.
So concentrate on getting a harmony activity set up that will do what you want, and after you have it set up, then it’s easy to just assign a switch to trigger it.
I was setting this up (awesome tutorial btw) with IFTTT and had everything almost working, when suddenly…my Smartthings Labs Harmony installed reenabled itself and the full integration is back…HURRAYYY!!!
You no longer need IFTTT to run activities through smartthings. It can be done directly through ST again.
I still needed to use the Virtual switches and configured them as you recommended. Everything works like a charm.
Thanks again for the tutorial and thank you ST for reintegrating the Harmony.
Are you talking about the Harmony Trigger app? That would be just as big achievement as the Echo integration!
Yes, the “Logitech Hamony Trigger” SmartLabs App is now fully functional for me. It was one of the main reasons I got ST and I was very dissapointed when I learned that a firmware update broke it. Happy that it’s back online.
Do you mean that it is working both ways now? Harmony -> ST as well as ST -> Harmony without the beta connect app and no workarounds? Well, that’s news…
I want that too! Been waiting for so long. The app doesn’t recognize neither one of my Harmony hubs.
Same here. The Hamony Connect app finds my hubs but then I get the device auth error. I believe IFTTT uses that app though and it works from IFTTT.
Same here I get “unexpected error” if I try to connect the hubs. So then I don’t have any hubs to use for the trigger app.
Just wanted to say thanks for the tutorial. I got Alex/ST/Harmony integration to work – and didn’t even need to use IFTTT now that the ST->Logitech integration seems at least partially fixed (I still get the “device auth” error in the smart app, but all my harmony activities now show up/work in ST).
Next I want to be able to trigger a Hello, Home action from my Harmony remote (e.g., Movies mode), I’ve not be able to figure that out yet – the Harmony software won’t connect to my virtual switch.
Edit: Actually, just sorted it: if I use a On/Off tile as my virtual switch type instead of a Simulated Switch, the Harmony software can connect to it. I can now change modes from the harmony software (and use the alternative off swtich method mentioned in the original post). Thanks again for the write up!
@JDRoberts thank you so much for this tutorial. I got my Harmony Smart Control today. I connected it and set it up like you instructed. This is AWESOME! I can control my TV, Cable, Xbox and Chromecast via voice with Echo. Can’t wait to show it off to the family in the morning. Thanks again.