Last year, when I configured my remote, I did everything in Home Assistant. Not only did I pull my entities from there, I also use Home Assistant Automations/Scripts rather than Remote 3 Activities/Macros.
When I wanted to switch between “activities”, it got really tough to keep track of everything, so after a year of not using the remote, when I pulled it out this year, I did it the opposite. I did 100% Remote 3 + integration with no Home Assistant.
Benefits of Home Assistant
My goal was to be able to control these devices from Home Assistant without my Remote 3 or add a dashboard to help with it. Why? Because I wanted to have that control.
Also, putting everything in Home Assistant means I have 1 place for configuration, and all the remotes can simply share the configs from Home Assistant.
Benefits of Integrations
If you do integrations on the device itself, you get these awesome pre-configured remote views with buttons already programmed into the remote:
I’d still like to go back to 100% Home Assistant, but I’m not sure if it makes sense. The “Remote” entities seem super valuable from these integrations.
How are you guys using Home Assistant and sharing configs? Do you add the integrations only for their Remote entity and leave the rest to Home Assistant?
How are you handling icon-style configs like this without those Remote 3 entities? Home Assistant doesn’t have all of the ones the configurations give you:
At the beginning of my Remote 2/3 journey, I was relying heavily on Home Assistant (the remote was actually the main reason to look into HA), because a lot of the integrations that are now available did not exist. E.g. for my Lyngdorf receiver I created scripts leveraging IP commands to control the device. The downside was that every script represented one entity on the Remote 2/3 side. Same for my Sky Q receiver. Creating activities then required the addition of a lot of entities and it became quite messy. With dedicated integrations on the remote itself this is now much cleaner.
Nowadays, I use integrations on the remote wherever possible and currently only rely on Home Assistant for Hue lights since the remote integration does not support scenes.
I have all entities that are IR or BT based added in the remote itself. All IP entities are in Home Assistant and then forwarded to the remote. Everything is directly controllable in the remote.
Never noticed any missing properties, but my setup is rather simple:
IR controlled amplifier
IR controlled DAC
IR and IP combined controlled TV
IP and BT combined controlled Apple TV
IP controlled PC
Some sensors in Home Assistant
For each activity I created a separate boolean helper switch in Home Assistant that’s also forwarded to the remote.
Each activity contains all the needed entities in the remote, plus the according boolean switch.
The sequencing for each activity consists of just that one boolean switch. Nothing else.
When the remote switches a boolean switch on or off, all the logic happens within Home Assistant. When the switch is turned on, the remote is happy and when something in the automation fails, I have some safeguards and notifications set up so either Home Assistant itself resolves the issue or I’ll get a notification.
Once in an activity all controls are done by the remote itself.
So for each activity I have created two automations (for on and off) and also for a few devices that stay on within multiple activities. So, yes that’s quite a lot of automations, but it has been rock solid ever since I built it this way.
Especially when something fails it’s very nice to have the safeguards in place, something you can’t really do in the remote itself.
Also when there’s waiting time for some devices after powering on or off, in Home Assistant you can build really nice state or time based conditions
There’s a thing called Stateful Scenes, available in HACS which creates switches for your scenes, that also will be switched on or off according to your scenes. Really helpful in your situation
Thanks. What I meant is that the Hue integration provided by UC does not support scenes which is why I import scenes from the Hue integration in HA which works without a problem.
I try to minimize the number of automations I have. I write scripts for repeat stuff and use trigger IDs to maintain single automations with multiple paths. This one:
But I stopped using Home Assistant for the remote because I didn’t wanna turn off my TV when switching activities to one that used the TV.
How the remote switches activites
That’s the thing I was having the most trouble figuring out. I have an idea how to fix it. Maybe some sort of boolean setup like you said. “TV is on” then if that boolean is set, don’t run the “off” if we’re switching activities rather than coming from the “off” state.
That’s how the remote itself works. It doesn’t turn off devices where those entities exist in the activity you’re switching to. It’s pretty jank on paper, but activity switching on the remote has worked for me without issue so far.
Getting multiple states in Home Assistant
I thought of using a multi-select dropdown instead of a bunch of toggles (booleans), but that’s simply not possible. Select’s are single-selection only:
Something I did in another automation was parse strings. I used a text field, stored a special-character-separated list and used Template actions to separate those out into separate states, then I stored those in a Variables action. It’s all pretty convoluted to get a simple multi-select entity without a bunch of disconnected booleans .
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