Harmony Home update for previous gen devices now available

Excellent! Now I have to wait until I get home to integrate it! Damn it!!!

So we still need the beta ST firmware?

There is no beta firmware from SmartThings for this.

What we are waiting for is the beta of the SmartThings cloud-to-cloud integration with Logitech Harmony.

You can control SmartThings devices from your Logitecth Harmony without the above cloud-to-cloud integration, but you will not be able to do the reverse (control the Logitech Harmony from a SmartApp) without it.

Thanks for the clarification.

Hoping @April gets me in on the beta :wink:

thanks for the updates. I’m able to control ST thru my Harmony Ultimate, but not thru the ST app. i try to install the Harmony App from the ST Labs, and it installs, finds my hub, and I can select my Things, but as soon as I hit NEXT, I get “An unexpected error occurred”.

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< slowly beats head against brick wall >

:grimacing:

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I have the Harmony->ST control working on my Smart Control, and have built a “Good Night” activity. This activity turns off all the lights, locks, the doors, and turns off the TV/Receiver/Cable in my bedroom. The problem is that this type of “Good Night” command needs to be triggered via one of the dedicated activity buttons and is then left in the “On” state, so far as the Harmony understands. The holy grail would be to make the Off button on the remote available to run a “Good Night” command when long-pressed. Currently, the off button is not allowed to trigger these types of events. Harmony team, help!

That would be awesome. Have you submitted that to Logitech support? It’s a great idea

I’ve submitted the idea of using a long-press of the Off key as an eligible activity button on the harmony beta forum. Let’s see how it goes…

There is an Ifttt recipe created by Harmony which will turn off a Harmony activity from a Do button.

It’s very indirect, but it’s also possible to have the button press for a harmony activity toggle a virtual switch which then turns off that activity via IFTTT.

There may be the usual “up to15 minutes” polling delay before IFTTT realizes the switch was hit.

However, for security reasons you can’t do activities that include locks.

No need for IFTTT - already have a native harmony activity that works with almost instant response. It would just be more refined if you could use a long-press of the Off button to trigger “Good Night” activities and anything triggered from the Off button always be treated in the off state. Currently I have the activity tied to long-press of the music activity button, then have to press the power button immediately after so the Harmony thinks no activities are currently running.

The point is just that you could chain the IFTTT to run at the end of the button press activity and Harmony would then consider that activity as Off again. So it would run your Good Night and then mark Good Night as Off again, all from the one button press.

You couldn’t include locks directly but you could include them indirectly from the ST side with a Hello Home Action that runs from the same virtual button.

So a single button press on the Harmony remote does the following:

Runs the Harmony Good Night activity, including toggling a virtual ST switch
The virtual switch triggers an HHA that locks the doors and
The virtual switch triggers IFTTT to tell Harmony to mark the Harmony Good Night activity as Off.

You end up where you want with a single button press, there just may be a polling delay before everything completes.

FREE Upgrade Available
Owners of Harmony Ultimate Hub-based products can now upgrade to home control functionality offered by Harmony Home Hub.

I need a little help getting Harmony to control ST. What I would like to do is map a button on my remote (Smart Control) to turn a light on/off when in my TV mode.

I’ve added ST as a device in my Harmony app, and when I “authorized” harmony to control ST, I selected the lights I wanted to be available. Now how to a map a button on my remote to toggle the light switch?

Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. Logitech does not currently provide the ability to map home control device actions to buttons, nor include them in sequences.

See this thread for a bit more discussion on this topic:

Oh bummer. I always wonder on these type of situations if there’s some really hard technical reason or they had some summer intern do the bare minimum to be able to make the marketing claim about ‘linking to SmartThings’…

This limitation drastically reduces the usefulness to me. I just want a button to “turn off/on” a set of lights without having to be in/out of some activity.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Yeah, we have 4 device toggle buttons on the Harmony Home Hub remote, and they’re really useful. Not sure why things work so differently on the other remote models.

This is actually nothing to do with the SmartThings integration. It is purely about how the Logitech Harmony currently deals with “home control” devices vs. “entertainment” devices. You would face exactly the same problem without SmartThings in the picture and trying to use any of the other “home control” devices directly supported by Logitech.

Its not that the other remotes work so differently, its just that they don’t have those four special buttons.

If you ignored those four buttons on your remote, you would have exactly the same restriction. You can’t map a home control device command to, for example, the “channel up” button.

I can see a logical progression of thought from where the Harmony remotes came from and their activity centric model, through the requirement later arising to add control for lights, etc. to where they are now, with “entertainment activities” (only one active at a time) and “home control activities” (can be turned on/off independently from all other activities). I (and others) just don’t think it’s an ideal solution as things currently stand - it is too constraining.

They need to promote “home control” devices to be first class citizens in their environment, alongside “entertainment” devices, allowing us to access commands for those devices in both sequences and directly mapping them to button presses / long-presses when we desire. The difficulty they face, however, is doing this in such a way that is still manageable by a non-technical audience and not throwing out the baby with the bath water (in this case, the way Harmony remotes manage state across multiple interconnected devices via the “(entertainment) activity” model).

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hehe - had to share this…

It turns out our Harmony remotes do have a very unexpected feature:

:joy: ROFLMAO

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Yeah, I know it’s a limitation on Harmony’s side… It just is frustrating that every solution in the IoT / Home Automation is half-assed right now.