How to get ST's Harmony Activities Buttons to Automatically Toggle

A small how-to. I’ll explain by example. Say you have a Watch Netflix and a Watch Prime activities on your Harmony Hub. These are represented as buttons in ST via the Classic integration. It works great, except for one thing. Say Netflix is on. If you tap Prime without first tapping Netflix again to shut it off, ST will now show both activity buttons as on, even through the Harmony app shows only the latest as active. Boo.

The solution is, for each activity on the Harmony Hub which was exported to ST:

  1. As you’ve already created activities on the Harmony Hub and added them into ST, for which they appear as buttons, you now go into the Harmony app and add those buttons as ST devices back to Harmony. It’s a bit circular, but I haven’t noticed a problem with it yet.
  2. Edit the activity in the Harmony app
  3. Edit the activity’s END SEQUENCE
  4. Click on EDIT HOME CONTROL
  5. In SELECT DEVICES check the ST device that is the button which represents this activity.
  6. Leave the ST device state as OFF

That’s it. Now, when the Harmony Hub goes through the end sequence for the given activity, whether that’s because you hit the same activity ST button again to shut everything off or because you hit another activity’s button to switch between activities, the activity you just came from will turn off the button in ST.

Why is this so useful to me? I built an activity and analogous ST button for each Roku channel, and I have Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, CBS All Access, YouTube, YouTubeTV, PBS & Smithsonian and a generic “Watch Roku”. After a while of jumping around through activities the SharpTools dashboard looks like a Christmas tree with no real indication of which activity I’m using… until I did this.

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