Logitech Harmony and Google Home Help

OREGATO

Hey guys,

I received my Logitech Harmony Ultimate and Hub yesterday and went through the set up process.

It's clunky enough but I've managed to set it up with the following in the living room:

1. Sky Box
2. LG TV
3. Electric Fireplace Heater

The main reason I bought the Harmony was to integrate it into Google Home to do two things:
1. Control TV/Sky Box with voice
2. Control electric heater on/off with voice

Here's the snag.

So in order for GH to work with Harmony, I need to set up activities, this was fine I thought..

I set up activity 'Watch TV' and if I ask GH to ask Harmony to turn on the TV, it'll do so.

The problem arises when I want to turn on the electric heater by voice. I can create an activity for that too, but if I tell GH to ask Harmony to turn on the electric heater when the TV is running, it will turn off the TV/Sky Box and turn on the electric heater!

So it looks like you can only run one activity at a time. And there is no way for me to control the heater without activities!

Anyone suggest any workarounds for this?

Kurn

Is the heater control included in any way in the "Watch TV" Activity? If so remove it.

Or is TV /Sky control included in the heater activity -remove it.

That's all I can think of.

OREGATO

Kurn wrote: »

Is the heater control included in any way in the "Watch TV" Activity? If so remove it.

Or is TV /Sky control included in the heater activity -remove it.

That's all I can think of.

Nope, they are completely separate. The issue I have is that according to what I've read online, the Harmony treats the electric heater as an 'entertainment' device so when you set up activities, it thinks that you're switching from TV to heater for entertainment or vice versa, thus turning off the other ...

bk

How is the Electric heater controlled? Is it controlled by IR from Harmony?

Maybe you could control the heater in a different manner, for instance using just a smart plug to switch it on/off?

If you let us know the make/model of your heater I could check it out and give you some ideas.

Ionised

I ran across a similar issue withe the Harmony. My solution was to create two activities. In your case one to just watch TV and another to watch TV with the heater on.

The high horse brigade

Can Google assistant not control the heater without harmony?

OREGATO

bk wrote: »

How is the Electric heater controlled? Is it controlled by IR from Harmony?

Maybe you could control the heater in a different manner, for instance using just a smart plug to switch it on/off?

If you let us know the make/model of your heater I could check it out and give you some ideas.

The electric heater is built into the fire place. It doesn't have a name, the only reference on the instruction manual is 'Charlton & Jenrick'.
There is an IR remote which has the following buttons:
1. Power Toggle - On/Off
2. High - Turn heat on high setting
3. Low - Turn heat on low setting
4. Flame - Adjusts the fake flame light

I tried to use a smart plug to switch it on/off but the problem is that it doesn't automatically turn on if that makes sense.

In order for Harmony to work, it has to Power Toggle and then Turn on the high setting. So it's a two button set up.

Any ideas you have would be greatly appreciated BK.

Ionised wrote: »

I ran across a similar issue withe the Harmony. My solution was to create two activities. In your case one to just watch TV and another to watch TV with the heater on.

I tried this but the issue is that we don't typically turn on the TV and the fire at the same time, so we could have the TV on, turn on the electric heater for 10 minutes and then turn off the heater again when the room heats up.
Could you share some more details - just to make sure I'm not missing something?

The high horse brigade wrote: »

Can Google assistant not control the heater without harmony?

I'm afraid not. The heater is an electric fireplace insert type heater so there are no 'smart controls' to it.

I do have Nest installed and that works fine with GA but most evenings, we are sitting in the living room and have no need to turn on the heating downstairs as a short 5/10 minute blast of the electric heater will have the room warm and cosy.

bk

That is a sticky problem OREGATO. So I don't have a solution with your existing hardware, but I do have two possible work arounds if you are willing to spend a bit more money. However no guarantees obviously as I haven't tried these.

1) Buy a second Harmony Hub (you only need the hub, not the remote). And have the fire control activity on the second hub so it works independent of the TV control.

Now currently GH doesn't directly control a second Harmony Hub (seemingly it is being worked on). But you can indirectly control it using IFTTT/Stringify

Again no guarantees, so I'd recommend buying it from a place with an easy, no argument, returns policy.

2) A cheaper alternative is this IR blaster device which you might be able to use to control it, however setup looks a bit complicated and involved:

https://medium.com/@drkatnz/home-automation-with-a-broadlink-rm-mini-3-and-google-home-712faa074254

OREGATO

Cheers BK! That's really really helpful.

I ended up buying the cheap IR blaster, I'm familiar with IFTTT and Stringify and have a few flows set up. To be honest, if I knew such a product existed, I probably would have bought it instead of the Logitech Harmony.

Once the Broadcom unit arrives, I'll post back an update to let you know how I got on with it. It's come from Aliexpress so could take a while to get here.

On a slightly separate note on the Logitech Harmony, I've set up the Sky Q box on it and I'm trying to work the favourites, trying to say something like 'Tell Harmony to put on Sky One HD' does not work. Only saying 'Tell Harmony to put on 102' or whatever the code is works, did anyone have any issues with this? I have the list of channels stored as favourites and I've synced the account.

bk

OREGATO wrote: »

On a slightly separate note on the Logitech Harmony, I've set up the Sky Q box on it and I'm trying to work the favourites, trying to say something like 'Tell Harmony to put on Sky One HD' does not work. Only saying 'Tell Harmony to put on 102' or whatever the code is works, did anyone have any issues with this? I have the list of channels stored as favourites and I've synced the account.

Again not a direct solution, but if you are using Google Home, then remember the new shortcuts feature, you could create favourites there, e.g.:

"Hey Google, Sky HD" -> "Hey Google, Tell Harmony to put on 102"

OREGATO

bk wrote: »

Again not a direct solution, but if you are using Google Home, then remember the new shortcuts feature, you could create favourites there, e.g.:

"Hey Google, Sky HD" -> "Hey Google, Tell Harmony to put on 102"

Completely never thought of that!! Even though I have a few shortcuts already in place! Thanks BK.

I’ll have to test it tomorrow but I can’t remember if harmony will change station if the activity for the tv is not running.

OREGATO

bk wrote: »

That is a sticky problem OREGATO. So I don't have a solution with your existing hardware, but I do have two possible work arounds if you are willing to spend a bit more money. However no guarantees obviously as I haven't tried these.

1) Buy a second Harmony Hub (you only need the hub, not the remote). And have the fire control activity on the second hub so it works independent of the TV control.

Now currently GH doesn't directly control a second Harmony Hub (seemingly it is being worked on). But you can indirectly control it using IFTTT/Stringify

Again no guarantees, so I'd recommend buying it from a place with an easy, no argument, returns policy.

2) A cheaper alternative is this IR blaster device which you might be able to use to control it, however setup looks a bit complicated and involved:

https://medium.com/@drkatnz/home-automation-with-a-broadlink-rm-mini-3-and-google-home-712faa074254

Hi BK,

Just wanted to update this thread and say a big thank you for the above recommendation! It worked a treat with a bit of tweaking

I only received delivery of the Broadlink unit yesterday from An Post hence the delay.

Last night I went about setting up the voice control with the IR blaster using the link you sent, however, I ran into issues as my router only supports ipV6 port forwarding so I sort of decided to see if there was an alternative approach.

I came across this thread which I used as a guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlehome/comments/7582zg/controlling_ir_devices_with_broadlink_rm3_and/ which I followed and I have it working now.

There are 3 catches,
1. You need a spare Android device (you can technically run it on your own phone but it would drain the battery)
2. You need to spend around €12 on three apps to get this working. I'm currently using 7 day trial versions of all the apps so will test over the next week to make sure it works fine before purchasing them.
3. The Join API will only allow me to configure one command, so if you want to try this with different IR commands, it's going to be more tricky. It's I only have one IR command I needed -> Power, Pause, High. This is set up as a combo. So when I say the on command, it'll start the fire and if I say the off command, it'll run the same command but the second IR command to set the fire to high will be ignored as the heater is off.


So what does this give me? It allows me now to use the Logitech Harmony Google Assistant voice control for the TV/Sky Box control and now I use IFTTT along with the set up above to control my heater using voice.