[DEPRECATED] Smartthings + Alexa + Harmony Hub -- 2017 Guide

The only activity context-based directions that I have had to work successfully are Up and Down, unfortunately, and these simply change the channel within a TV-based activity (Channel Up/Down aliases).

I had the others stubbed in while I was testing and forgot to remove them from the guide. Thanks for catching that!

OK cool thanks for clarifying. It would be so helpful if amazon included those commands in harmony. I suppose in time they will

Yeah. I really hope that this year we see all of the Harmony-capable commands added and have Alexa become a fully-functioned Harmony “remote”.

I’m sure we will :slight_smile:

I’ve been trying to figure out how you address multiple different Harmony Hub Activities thru Alexa and Smartthings. The above instructions go as far as telling you how to set them up, but don’t tell you how you would address them separately when you have more than one hub? How do you “turn on TV” if you have two TVs controlled by different hubs?

So, the big limitation right now is that the Harmony Skills in Alexa were not designed to support multiple hubs, as you know.

The Smartthings Skill, however, will expose ALL imported Harmony Activities to Alexa as addressable devices.

So, what you need to do is:

  1. In MyHarmony, rename activities so that they have a unique name across both Harmony Hubs (e.g. “Watch Living Room TV”, “Watch Home Theater TV”, etc). Make sure you Sync after renaming Activities/Devices.
  • What I have done is left my main Harmony Hub (the one that I watch the most and need the most control over) as is. So those Activities retain the original names, such as “Watch TV”.
  • This is also the Hub that I use as the Hub for the Harmony Skills in Alexa. This is the one that allows greater control over volume and changing channels through Alexa.
  1. Once you are sure you have unique Activities across Hubs, sync all Hubs with MyHarmony and remove any “old” ones from Smartthings.
  2. Re-add Harmony Hubs and Activities to Smartthings.
  3. In the Alexa app, either Forget All Devices, or manually Forget the old Harmony Activities. If you made changes to Activities on the “main” Hub (the one used for Harmony Skills in Alexa), you will need to disable both Harmony Skills also.
  4. If you had to disable Harmony Skills, re-enable them in Alexa, assigning “Friendly Names” as is appropriate.
  5. Have Alexa Discover Devices to bring in any device changes you made in Smartthings.
  6. At this point, you should have all Harmony Skills Devices/Activities from the main Hub, as well as Smartthings Harmony Activities, as devices in Alexa.

So, what I’ve done is kept my family room Hub Devices/Activities with the “default” names. So if I tell Alexa, “Turn on the TV”, Alexa turns on the TV in the family room.

I have named my other Hubs after the rooms where they are located. I also prefix the activities with the location name also. So, I then use “Alexa, turn on Den TV” or “Alexa, turn on Game Room TV”, or “Alexa, turn on Game Room Xbox”, or “Alexa, turn on Den Roku”.

Occasionally, Alexa does get confused, since the names are so similar and will either turn on the wrong TV or prompt you with the “Which one did you want?” dialogue.

Other than that, it works perfectly fine until the Harmony Skill adds multiple Hub support.

Alternatively, you can use Xonomi, http://www.yonomi.co/blog/hey-alexa-meet-yonomi/. This has been used by the ST community for a while.

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Hi, I am new to smartthings and trying to understand the benefits of integrating harmony hub into smartthings. I currently use the harmony skill and yonomi to integrate harmony into echo. What additional value I get by using smartthings?

Integrating into ST would simply give you the ability to manage/trigger Harmony Activities just like you would a “normal” device in ST. It gives you the ability to include Harmony Activities into your ST Routines and Smartapps. It would also allow you to directly address those Activities from Alexa as devices (but this is now covered by the Harmony – Optimized for Smarthome Skill as well).

Added a link to a post for instant status updates between Harmony Hub and ST. Thanks @destructure00.

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As mentioned in the bullet list at the top, of the two available skill sets (red icon vs blue icon in Alexa skill setup) each can control ONE hub. I just used this myself to assign the blue icon skill set to the Living Room hub and the red icon skill set to my Bedroom hub. I had both assigned to the Living Room prior not knowing I could assign them individually. To get at the hub assignment within Alexa skill settings, I disabled the red icon and then went ahead and re-enabled it, logging into Harmony to pair them. Once at the end screen, read the fine print toward the bottom of the paragraph and you will see a link to “reassign” the hub choice. That done, Bedroom now reacts to the “Echo tell Harmony to …” activity commands.

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Still far from ideal since the language is different for each hub. Until you can address them using the same language (i.e. “Alexa, turn TV in the Family Room on”) I will continue to use IFTTT because that’s precisely what I’m able to do there albeit with awkward “trigger” keyword.

Yeah. I’m really not sure why room context wasn’t factored in to all these systems from the beginning. Even with ST, the Rooms are merely containers and not even functional groups.

At least Amazon added functional groups to Alexa which can easily be used for scene control (kinda).

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I actually just discovered you can rename any device in SmartThings which has basically solved ALL my problems. I simply renamed the activities in SmartThings to be contextual like “Televsion in the Family Room” and “Television in the Theater” and now everything is working fine. I can simply say “Alexa, turn on Television in the Family Room”. No need to change the names of the actual Harmony Activities since you can give them different names in SmartThings.

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How do you turn off the activity that is active?

Yes, that’s slightly odd but more a SmartThings problem. If you move from Activity to Activity, the Smartthings seems to sometimes get confused that multiple activities are all “On”. Sometimes it seems to resolve itself over time. Sometimes it doesn’t. In any case, you can turn off the active activity the same way you turn it on (i.e. “Alexa, turn off Television in the Family Room”).

Define turn off.

You usually switch activities or turn off TV

Dosn’t this completed turn off TV?

I’m not sure what you’re asking. Harmony is a state machine. If the previous activity required the TV to be on, it would turn off. What’s your actual question because your response doesn’t really make any sense. You asked “How do you turn off the activity that is active”. I told you how but then you’re confused that the devices would actually turn off. Are you actually asking how you “switch” activities?

Turn off the current activity. Yes, it means turn off the TV and the activity that’s active on Harmony hub. There are several ways of doing it.

@SBDOBRESCU
In my system, when I tell Harmony either through Alexa directly for the first hub or through Alexa and ST for the second hub to turn off TV it also turns off the activity. When I start again, I have to tell it what to start as activity. Also, when setting activities in Harmony I edited power option for some devices (TV and audio for example) to keep them ON when switching activities.
Never had a failure.
By design also, Harmony can only have one activity active at any given moment.