So only day two with the remote 3 so hopefully this is not something really obvious…
I’ve managed to bring together most of the stuff I need for replacing my harmony remote (LG TV, Sky Q, FireTV etc). The trickiest part has been controlling my Hue HDMI Sync box. I have got the functionality that I need by connecting the box to home assistant, and writing a bunch of scripts to do things like select the hdmi port, power off/on etc. The HA integration allows me to access these scripts, which is great, but they appear as individual entities rather than a single Sync Box entity.
Adding the sequence “switch on, delay some time, select souce” works to all my activities works, but the optimisations that activity group provide (i.e. if it’s already on, bypass that step and the associated delay) does not seem to apply.
It sounds like I need to create a single virtual device/entity that maps to the HA scripts I have, and use that in the activity, so that it’s state can be know, and therefore optimised.
I believe your post covers two separate issues:
For my Sky Q receiver I have created about 20-30 scripts in HA to replicate the buttons on the IR remote control. I agree it would be nice to have one virtual remote with all the HA scripts included and be able to add that to an activity instead of having to add each script separately.
That being said, I don’t believe your issue with the activity group is related to that. My guess is that the remote does not know the power state of the hue box as they are not exposed by the HA script. Can you try to use IR commands to power on/off the Hue box and see if that works. Remember you need two separate POWER_ON and POWER_OFF IR commands.
The Sky Q didn’t require any HA involvement for me. I just used the IR codes. The tricky part for that was figuring out how to enable IR support on the Sky Q as it is off by default.
The Hue Sync box doesn’t come with a remote as it is app driven. However the specs say IR is supported, so I will investigate that. I will start by seeing if the Harmony integration uses IR to switch it on, but I suspect it does not. HA has the power state information, but presumably there’s no way of using it on the remote.
So presumably if I can find IR codes I will just be able to configre a blank IR remote, add the code(s) and then add that to my activity.
It would be so much easier if the web configurator would allow an “external remote” to be defined in terms of the HA commands I feel a feature request coming on if there isn’t one already…
If you have a harmony remote you might be able to use it to learn commands with the UC Dock. After a quick search it seems the Sync app supports programming of IR codes. That might be useful as well.
As it happens, the solution was simpler than that.
The requirement for the Activity Group control does indeed appear to be to use an entity that maintains state. I had not noticed that the HA integration not only provided access to the scripts I was using to power the box on, and switch ports etc, but it also exposed the switches for power and syncing as entities. Using these rather than the scripts solves the issue!
Many lessons learned… now to find a way to copy the device interface into the activity
I feel a feature request coming on if there isn’t one already…