Smartthings+Echo+Harmony Hub = Voice Controlled TV! (2016 version)

I have a similar setup using an. ivee instead of an echo. It gives an error sometimes also but works anyway. Maybe someday echo will be able to link directly to harmony. I actually use my harmony app to control everything because the devices update from hue properly. So i have virtual switches in smartthings for room lighting scenes being controlled by harmony.

Now this is not by any means a permanent solution but I did find better consistency by creating virtual buttons and adding harmony activies mixed with some smarthings actions to turn on when a virtual button is used. Echo thinks it is a switch so it doesn’t have a problem.
Here is a link to create virtual switch:

The only problem with this is the polling. If you turn on the TV with echo but turn it off through a remote smarthings still believes the switch is on. So you would have to manually turn the switch off via mobile app to be able to use the virtual switch.
Now if someone can build a virtual button that can link it’s on/off status with a smarthings added harmony activity, then we may be able have a winner.

I successfully created refresh rules for my harmony activities using rule machine. I have 18 harmony activities. And what was happening was when I executed the refresh command, and watching in the api, it was throwing an error because execution time took too long.

So I made six refresh rules in RM. each rule refreshes 3 harmony activities. Each rule is triggered by a motion sensor. Each rule is delayed by 5 seconds longer than the previous one. So rule #1 refreshes the first three activities, then rule # 2 refreshes the next three activities with a delay of 5 seconds, rule #3 refreshes activities the next three activities with a delay of 10 seconds. Then rule #4 refreshes the next three activities with a delay of 15 seconds And so on. I’ve had no errors in API. Even walking by the motion sensor 10 times in one minute. Everything plays out OK. And refresh is fine.

Ok, so I’ve had my Harmony, ST, and Echo working for awhile now. For some reason yesterday, my Hue lights went crazy in ST. By crazy I mean the Hue Connect smartapp duplicated itself with the old IP address for the hub, and all the lights came back with old names. This cause my Echo to get confused, and it’s just been a hell of a night removing my lights from all the smartapps and getting everything reinstalled. I’m currently working on getting my Hue bulbs back on my Harmony Home controller, but only my bedroom lights, which are Hue Lux, are showing up when I connect ST through the Logitech app. How can I get my regular Hue bulbs back in through ST? I don’t want to connect straight to the Hue hub because of the polling issues. Also because if I try to use Echo to turn them on or off after using the remote, ST won’t trigger because it’ll already think they’re on or off.

Suggestions?

I have an issue now with all of my hue connected lights being duplicated in the Echo app, even though I “forget” the duplicates in the app, they reappear again.

Whats the best solution to avoid the repeat?

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Hi Trey, did you ever find a solution for this? I’m having the same issue regardless of what method I try. If I select the startup channel of “507”, it only sends the command “5” to the set top box. Even if I try to set the initial channel by “adding a step” to the activity, I get the same results. This has to either be a bug or something isn’t working right in the timing. 5+ hours in and I can’t figure it out. Any luck on your end?

This thread is a few months old, hope you’re still out there, had dome something similar except I have a basic startup activity to get the tv on and then separate activities for each channel change with just the STB as the device, not including the tv. Do you see any advantages to including the tv in each activity, and if so what and what are the power settings for the tv so it doesn’t turn off between each channel change?

Thanks!

Try Anymote for android or ios. The app is free . Just enable it on the Alexa web page. It can use either IR blast from your phone or connect to any device on your LAN. The commands are little wordy. But it works. Control TV , DVR etc. Changing channels you can’t say 2.4.5 or 2.45, you have to say two hundred and forty five. So it goes like this: Alexa, tell anymote to channel two hundred and fouty five on my dvr. That’s a lot of words. But for on/of pause play guide. it works well I’ don’t use the IR from my phone . All my devices are connected to my LAN.

I had the same setup working till 2 weeks ago, Now telling alexa to turn on the TV does not do anything. Do I need to delete and re-add the activities?

Any one else facing this issue after the last system wide blowout of smarththings?

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I have the same problem. Alexa says “ok” and smartthings app show as on but nothing happens. I have to use the Harmony remote to turn TV on or off. I also tried setting up an IFTT between alexa and harmony and still nothing.

I’m having issues too. I have activities set up so I can tell Alexa to turn on HGTV or some other channels… Now I either get ok, or Smartthings isn’t responding. The inputs set correctly but the channel changes aren’t sent. - grrrrr

So it seems like a widespread issue after the scheduler change and all this week. Anyone from smartthings care to comment on this ? @thegilbertchan ??

This fixed it

Had the same issue. I removed then re added Smartthings to Alexa which didn’t fix the issue. Then I realized that Smartthings was not communicating with my Harmony. The fix was removing the re adding Smartthings to my Harmony, then reauthorizing Smartthings to communicate with the Harmony through the Harmony app. Once that was done I removed and reauthorized Smartthings hub and the associated devices in the Alexa app. Everything worked after that.

Thanks , the re-authentication fixed it. Anyone having issues probably needs to open harmony connect and re-authenticate the credentials

Question: Can you turn off the activities by using the same command as turning the TV on? For instance, can i say, “Alexa, turn on the TV” and then say, “Alexa, turn off the TV”. ? I was under the impression that the ECHO wasn’t able to turn off the Harmony activity once it was on using the same name? If saying, “turn on the TV”, starts the harmony activity, then saying turn off the TV would try to turn ON the same activity. Am I wrong here?

When the integration is working properly, you can tell her to turn activities on and off.

Turn on and Turn off works fine on activities for me. Just that sometimes alexa throws a “hmm smartthings is not responding right now” sometimes.

Its not consistent ATM

The integration seems to be fine after I did re-authentication via the smartphone app. Did you try that ?

thanks for the update. This must have changed at some point. This was not the case when the Echo / Smart Things integration was first introduced.

Alexa seemed to be ignoring me earlier, I was able to turn the activity on but turning off was a different store. I gave the turn off command, she was listening and then the light turned off. No confirmation, error, or problem with ST.