[EDGE DEVICE] Simple Harmony Bridge **Alpha Testing**

I’ve came to the conclusion that it’s a wifi channel issue on my network. Maybe.
I cannot use channel 1 on my 2.4 wifi for whatever reason with my Harmony hubs. They just won’t connect and the red light on the hub stays a solid red. I need to use channel 11 and I think this is causing me issues with one of my hubs.

EVening! I have been fiddling around with smartthings recently and realised that your driver potentially solves a couple of scenarios I would like to automate. Thank you for your work and support! I am having a teething issue in setup though. WHen running through the setup, the initial activity list I get back seems sort of… odd. I can see one activity listed in the device list field - but i can’t read the full field to enable me to copy the activity/action command lists. AM I missing something monumentally dim? Allowing the addition of activity devices toggle results in them being added just fine - but how do I get at the list to customise things??? I can’t even see the history annoyingly.

HELP!!!

MrSpax

Hi @mrspax

First of all, welcome!

The list you are seeing that you cannot fully open, is to be used get access for device automation mainly, i.e sending instructions directly to devices ( regardless of the current activity) by using automations. This is cumbersome to use in the smartthings mobile app, because you cannot easily select lines to copy, and scrolling the full list is difficult. You can view the full list in the history tab of the app. It is better to use my.smartthings.com to get the values to copy & paste

Give that a try, if the list is missing from history turn on config on connect in settings for 5 minutes and it should reload the config list

Thank you for the super quick response and the kind welcome!

I understand what you are saying. Issue (to me at least) seems to be more involved. There is no history data available for the driver. I am looking at the browser portal and same issue on pc, Android and iOS browsers. Is there some kind of setting needed to see the history maybe? I am sure it has picked the activities up as it has added them as dummy switches when I used that functionality. I should say that I have left it for a couple of hours after selecting the ‘get config on connect’ toggle.

I must be missing something simple… :grimacing::grimacing:

Here’s the driver details too. You can see it’s picked up an activity, but I can’t’get at it’ in the app or web interface.

Weird that the history isn’t populating, but I have seen delays before.

If you use this tool, you should be able to see the value of the device list field in full ( without the need for history) [EDGE][RELEASE] Simple Device Info Viewer

Load that tool (following the instructions on the link), find your harmony bridge device and then click the clipboard button. You will then be able to navigate to deviceList field and see the full contents.

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This is VERY helpful. I too was having difficulty getting this data to populate again.

Thank you for the driver and all your help.

Getting closer… :slight_smile:

Managed to get the list - thanks for that tip. I noticed the history had also updated overnight.

But…

I’m now having issues with the driver not accepting the input of the command. When inputting it in the UI, I get a network error and the Harmony COmmand field remains not assigned. I can;t assign a command in the settings or in a routine/scene either. Settings field remains greyed out and the routines/scenes creation process only allows me to trigger the virtual toggle.

Am I missing something here?!?!

I’ll drop you a direct message to see if I can help

This popped up on my iPhone.
What this update. Anyone tried it.

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Updated the app on my iPhone and my iPad. Haven’t noticed any difference.

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It requires re logging in and connecting your ST using the new method. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work. I tried it several times, along with others. There is a thread regarding this already: https://community.smartthings.com/t/update-for-the-harmony-app-to-work-with-the-new-smart-things/260071/6

Also, on the Harmony subreddit, they are discussing a firmware update that has bricked many remotes and causing a slew of problems.

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Should it be this chatty or did I miss configure something? I have two Harmony Remote Hubs, Basement and Family Room. I have only been testing in the Basement.

That doesn’t look right, is it working at all? Probably worth deleting and starting again.

It looks like it’s stuck in a restart loop, to properly diagnose the issue I would need to see your logcat logs (feel free to send to me on DM)

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I’ll delete it and try again this weekend. I was messing around with this since the Harmony Remote can no longer control the lights I had configured to an activity.

Thank you for making this driver! I would like to make a request regarding activity states. In addition to an activity On/Off state, would it be possible to add activity starting and activity stopping states? This would allow me to trigger smart devices on activity states starting/stopping.

From what i see in the logs, the hub will notify on activity states with

Logger: Payload Recd: {“type”:“connect.stateDigest?notify”,“data”:{“sleepTimerId”:-1,“runningZoneList”:,“sequence”:false,“activityId”:“41910357”,“errorCode”:“200”,“syncStatus”:0,“activitySetupState”:false,“stateVersion”:205,“tzOffset”:“-14400”,“mode”:3,“hubSwVersion”:“4.15.330”,“deviceSetupState”:,“tzoffset”:“-14400”,“isSetupComplete”:true,“discoveryServer”:“https://svcs.myharmony.com/Discovery/Discovery.svc”,“wifiStatus”:1,“time”:1679006655,“activityStatus”:2,“runningActivityList”:“41910357”,“tz”:“EST5EDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0”,“updates”:{“106”:“4.14.112”,“100”:“4.14.112”},“contentVersion”:166,“hubUpdate”:false,“configVersion”:668,“accountId”:“7223171”}}

I performed some testing and think the activity states correlate to the following parameter values.
connect.stateDigest with activityId = -1 and activityStatus = 0 means activity off.
connect.stateDigest with activityId = activeid and activityStatus = 1 means activity starting
connect.stateDigest with activityId = activeid and activityStatus = 2 means activity on
connect.stateDigest with activityId = activeid and activityStatus = 3 means activity stopping

Hi @VVicked

I could possibly look at this in the future and give it some thought, but first let me explain why it works the way it does today.

  • First of all, switches are boolean they can only be on or off, by their very nature, within the wider smartthings eco system, and anything else you integrate with switches are the most commonly supported device types (e.g google, alexa).
  • There is no stock capability that would support {off, on, starting, stopping}, so that would mean a custom capability - which would be great for automations but couldn’t be automatically recognized by anything you may integrate with e.g IFTTT or Alexa
  • Starting and stopping are fleeting statuses so are quite easily missed, missed status messages are a problem with this integration for some people - this is why I have a poll routine setup to get the current running activity every minute incase a message is missed, but polling will not catch fleeting statuses like starting as the intervals are too sparse.
  • Just because something is starting, doesn’t mean it will start (I think this limits it’s usefulness - but happy to be challenged on that)
  • Just because something is stopping, doesn’t mean it will stop (I think this limits it’s usefulness - but happy to be challenged on that)

The above are the reasons I settled on making this a binary on/off switch

I could add a secondary status field to the activities that works independently of the on/off behavior already developed, but first would like to understand what use case you are considering this for? And understand if that is something more widely valuable i.e does it solve a common problem in a way that cannot be solved in a different way, and is it likely to be used. Basically I want to check how niche it is before I invested my time (sorry for that)

Thanks

Louis

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  • First of all, switches are boolean they can only be on or off, by their very nature, within the wider smartthings eco system, and anything else you integrate with switches are the most commonly supported device types (e.g google, alexa).

Thank you for responding and sorry I couldn’t respond earlier. Also, thank you for taking time to explain the rationale behind the current design. I makes sense that you designed this integration to cover 99% of use cases.

  • Starting and stopping are fleeting statuses so are quite easily missed, missed status messages are a problem with this integration for some people - this is why I have a poll routine setup to get the current running activity every minute incase a message is missed, but polling will not catch fleeting statuses like starting as the intervals are too sparse.

From my experience using 5 harmony hubs, I have 4 harmony hubs without any smart home control integrations and those work pretty rock solid. I “had” 1 harmony hub that’s integrated to multiple smart home control and I also noticed the activity starting/stopping states getting stuck. I then removed smart home control from the 5th hub and it started working stable again. Now I completely removed the native smarthing/harmony which was not local control. Using your current implementation, I use smartthings routine to monitor whenever my Harmony watch movie projector activity is On/OFF, then I control my movie theater lights completely within smarthings (which is using local control).

  • Just because something is starting, doesn’t mean it will start (I think this limits it’s usefulness - but happy to be challenged on that)
  • Just because something is stopping, doesn’t mean it will stop (I think this limits it’s usefulness - but happy to be challenged on that)

So there is one limitation with Harmony that I disliked. Smart controls are always executed at the end of an activity start/stop and if the activity had problems, smart device control is NEVER executed. The reason I requested the starting/stopping states are to be able to control my movie theater light scenes BEFORE the activity starts/stops and regardless if the activity actually finishes. For my setup, even if activity gets stuck, it’s okay (in my situation) because I want my lights controled regardless if there is an error with the activity.

  • There is no stock capability that would support {off, on, starting, stopping}, so that would mean a custom capability - which would be great for automations but couldn’t be automatically recognized by anything you may integrate with e.g IFTTT or Alexa

Would you consider adding a secondary device with custom capability to support this? For example, there is a virtual edge garage door device that supports “closing, opening, closed, open, unknown”. For this custom “door/activity” device, it would only update its state on received connect.stateDigest events. Upon reconnection to the harmony bridge, the activity state would be unknown until a connect.stateDigest event is received. As mentioned, I understand that there are instability and bugs with Harmony, but those are Harmony bugs that I wouldn’t expect that you could fix. Displaying the status exactly as reported by Harmony would be acceptable and allow me to recognize/debug a an activity problem.

I had this working perfectly for several months and suddenly it stopped.

in My Smartthings the last log is

logger: Bridge Device [XXXXXXXX] - Initialising

logger: Bridge Device [XXXXXXXX] - Setting up current activity poll

Did you have a power outage or unplug your Harmony hub which would change your IP address?