Hello, quite new to SmartThings and have a quick question about something I’m stuck with.
I’m trying to turn on a smart plug when I turn off my TV using the harmony remote. I’ve read about the harmony smartapp but that doesn’t seem to help in this instance.
The problem I’m having is that when I turn the TV off with the harmony remote, SmartThings doesn’t seem to recognise that it’s turned off and doesn’t trigger the routine. If I turn the TV off with the SmartThings app, then the routine triggers.
You need to add the command to turn off the plug to the routine or routines that involve your TV. When harmony has finished executing the IR commands it with then control any home control devices like the smart plug.
Step one is getting Harmony to control a switch as part of your off activity. After you’ve got that going, then you can have SmartThings do any number of cool things depending on the state of your Harmony controlled virtual switch (or more likely momentary button)
The harmony smartapp goes both ways it exposes your harmony activities to SmartThings, but also exposes your SmartThings devices to Harmony. The second part is what you’re wanting in terms of having a Harmony activity action trigger a SmartThings interaction.
The problem is that Harmony doesn’t immediately refresh it’s state in ST. So the solution is to create a virtual switch in ST, and have the Harmony routine change the switch. Then you can create any kind of routing in ST to respond to the switch state.
As I understand it you’re trying to control a Smart Things device (plug) from a Harmony activity. That’s different than asking SmartThings to control a Harmony activity and thus really isn’t that hacky in my opinion. To achieve that you need to expose the device to Harmony. You can do that either via the physical plug itself which will allow the harmony activity to control it. Or if you want more logic like only turning off the plug between certain hours then you’d probably want to use the momentar virtual “hack”. That’s because harmony doesn’t have a rules engine to apply your 2200 rule, instead its ALWAYS going to hit the switch tied to your activity. So instead you’ll give it a virtual switch and use SmartThing’s flexible logic engine to run something like CORE that will let let you turn off your physical plug if the switch harmony interacts with is hit AND its between your set hours… Honestly rather than hacky seems to me more like a very flexible method of abstracting different systems capabilities to provide an incredibly customizable and relatively seamless experience, imo…
I could of course be misunderstanding what you’re trying to do though…
@scottalex the reason I say hacky is that there’s already a switch on ST for each harmony activity. It just seemed a little unnecessary to have to create a momentary switch to replicate a switch that already exists, but doesn’t refresh its state as quick
Ahh gotcha, yeah that makes more sense. I’m guessing the additional switch method is faster because its state change is part of the harmont activity itself, whereas the activity switch in smartthings is probably only updated as part of some harmony post activity completion synchronization service.
