I set up a Harmony finally few months ago; with Alexa controlling SamsungTV & Denon AVR fine. Recently picked up a Honeywell remote control floor fan and I am able to customize a device for it in Harmony app.
Issues I’m having…
-can’t figure out a way to delete device commands/buttons in the harmony app. It only has power toggle not off and on like the template environmental control device the app decided to use for me
-alexa can’t find this fan, should I create separate actions for each command, or should it work similar to TV with one action (alexa, turn on fan, turn up fan, turn on fan oscillate, etc)? I’ve tried recognizing new devices in alexa app
-I can’t figure out what the current proper/recommended/best Harmony-SmartThings integration is now. Do I use a community smartapp (kuku?) or no just “Logitech Harmony (Connect)” ? Ultimately I would like the remote control fan to show in SmartThings/ActionTiles
I know there are some Harmony/SmartThings problems currently, just trying to understand how its supposed to work.
When you use Harmony with the official SmartThings integration, you only have access to “activities,” not to the device like the fan itself.
And you can only turn an activity on or off.
So this often means that when using the official SmartThings/Harmony integration you end up with a whole bunch of different activities for the same device. That is each different setting requires a different activity.
The alternative, as you mentioned, is to use Kuku harmony. That’s a custom project built by a community member. It will give you access to the individual button codes that you would have if you were using a Harmony handheld remote, but it does require that you run an additional device as a server and the set up is pretty complicated.
It’s not that one of these methods is better than the other: it just depends on what you need. If all you need is to control an activity, then the official integration works fine and is much easier. But if you need more granular controls, then you won’t be able to do that with the official integration
In either case, Alexa will not see the fan as a separate device. If you use the official Harmony or SmartThings integration with Alexa, Alexa will see the individual activities, not the fan.
If you use Kuku Harmony, to be honest I’m not sure exactly how an echo integration would work through SmartThings–you should check that thread to see what people are doing.
Back to the beginning
Before deciding how you were going to integrate smartthings with Harmony for your fan, though, you first have to set up the fan so that it works the way you want it to with Harmony. Because smartthings can’t change the way harmony interact with the fan. It just gives you a different way of getting to it.
Unfortunately, we can’t help you with setting up the fan in harmony – – you will need to go to the Harmony forums or talk to harmony support for that.