First off, I know that those who have a hub can try the community – created edge driver for Harmony. But the vast majority of users of the smartthings app do not have an ST hub. But some of them do have a Harmony hub.
For those who do have a smartthings/Aeotec hub, here’s the link to that edge driver:
I know the Harmony hub has been discontinued by harmony, which means smartthings won’t be doing anything with integration. And I asked Harmony support if they were going to, and they said no, they won’t be updating the current one. They also said they would not be updating the Harmony hub for matter, so no joy there.
There is a very limited Ifttt channel which will let you start or end a Harmony activity. If you get really deep into those, you can build some integrations even for things like volume changes: I did way back in 2014 before we had a better integration. But it’s a lot of work.
There Is an Alexa harmony skill with more options, but linking it to smartthings would require virtual devices, and it’s not clear yet how those of us without hubs are going to create and manage virtual devices after groovy.
So does anybody have any creative way of integrating harmony with smartthings after groovy if you don’t have a SmartThings/Aeotec hub? Or is what I’ve already described the best that can be done?
I’ll just think out aloud here (and write it down to see if it helps you)
Harmony as far as I know, only has 2 open integration points (XMPP and WebSockets) - they both run locally on your own lan - I don’t think there is any internet based api that works through logitech servers that has ever been made available (obviously their is one as that is how the old integration worked, and things like IFTTT, Alexa and Google Assistant, but it’s private afaik)
Because you don’t have a hub, local execution into your lan from smartthings (at least directly) is impossible, because everything smartthings for you runs in the cloud
This leads to a key question - do you have something on your local lan where you could install software? e.g a raspberry pi, server, always on computer, NAS that supports running node applications
If the answer to this question is yes, then I think you have a few options to explore
Run a different home automation tool that already has harmony integration locally on your network - then investigate ways to integrate them back into smartthings - I’m sure somebody will be working on this already for the big ones e.g HA and NodeRed
Develop a modern style smartapp but hosted locally on your lan so that it can communicate directly with harmony - but still be accessible publicly by smartthings cloud (@TAustin has already documented ways to make this possible using ngrok i think). There are also many existing libraries and APIs that simplify the harmony integration that would make the harmony side of this much simpler.
MQTT - Use something like this to expose your harmony devices to an MQTT broker (either locally on your home server / pi - or somewhere it the cloud). Then hope somebody makes a way for those MQTT topics to be exposed in smartthings via a smartapp/webhook - I think @TAustin again has been working in this area - exposing st switches to MQTT broker - i’m not sure if he has plans to do the same in reverse (bring mqtt topics into ST as a switch)
I think these are all potential options, hopefully this gives you some ideas so you can start reading about what is already available and head in that direction. 1 and 3 might already be available if modern smartapps have been made available for integration into a diff HA platform, or their is an MQTT smartapp that can already do what you want.
Thanks! I’m sure that answer will be helpful to many people.
For myself, because of my physical limitations I have to pay someone else even to do simple tasks like change the batteries in a sensor. And my voice reader software does not do well with code. And only one of my personal assistants is at all technical.
So I won’t be adding anything to my setup that requires any kind of ongoing technical maintenance. Or any programming. I did have a SmartThings hub for 4 years and it cost me a fortune in technical maintenance just to keep up with the glitches. something that was not true with my other home automation systems, mostly because I didn’t keep anything else that required that much attention.
But again, that’s just me. I appreciate the level of thought and detail in your answer: I’m sure it will be helpful to many people. Although at that point, it might be easier to just get an ST/Aeotec hub and use Edge Drivers for Harmony. I have been considering that option just to get virtual devices since so far no one has been able to say how people without hubs will create virtual devices once the Groovy cloud shuts down. But I’m hoping I won’t have to, just for financial reasons.
Using a locally-running SmartApp you can expose any SmartThings device’s state to MQTT, not just switches
Using my MQTT Discovery driver, you can bring MQTT topics IN to SmartThings. You can literally create devices via MQTT messages as well as update their states. My driver currently supports the following device types:
something that was not true with my other home automation systems, mostly because I didn’t keep anything else that required that much attention.