I’m spoiled by not having to rely on IR for my setup. In fact, my room configuration makes line of sight control a pain. I have IR extenders, but I cannot position them properly as the wife won’t agree to having wires running all over the living room.
I love the way the Harmony talks to its hub via RF, then the hub controls devices via IR, Bluetooth and/or IP. It can be tukced away, out of sight.
I’m finding it impossible to duplicate this with the Remote Two. Part of the problem is there are no integrations for my devices. I thought Home Assistant might help, but not enough entities are exposed there to control all aspects of my media kit.
Will there ever be a library of integrations, similar to the Harmony that will work over IP? Is there any way to port the integrartions from the Harmony hub to the Remote Two? Besides IR, does the Remote Two hub emit Bluetooth commands to control devices?
Many thanks for any advice. In the meantime, I’m thankful that my Harmony is still working and Logitech haven’t disabled it yet.
You can find a roadmap of upcoming features and planned integrations here: Software roadmap
This also includes pairing the remote as a Bluetooth keyboards wich should work for most devices that are not supported at the moment.
Furthermore community developers can work on other integrations. There is no official list for this but they will probably post it here and/or on Discord when they can be tested.
purchase a Broadlink RM4 Pro, integrate it with home assistant and have it learn your ir commands. Then use the remote to control them through the home assistant integration.
sort of crazy, but continue to use your harmony hub through the home assistant integration from your new remote.
The second is clearly a bridging strategy but I think it should keep everything working, let you use the new remote, and buy some time until the awesome guys at unfolded circle can get everything implemented.
I’ve got an RM4 Pro. I use it so I can automate, with Home Assistant, my ceiling fans that use RF commands.
I don’t understand how it would help in my situation, though. I want to avoid having to use IR as I don’t have line of sight to all the devices that need controlling.
Indeed, your second point is ‘sort of crazy’. I might as well just keep using my Harmony as long as it keeps working, which it is.
But thanks for the suggestions. Greatly appreciated.
Sounds like you may be in a different situation but I assumed that your harmony hub was communicating with your out of sight devices. If it can, what prevents an RM4 pro placed in the same place to do the same thing?
And I get ya about the harmony. But I can tell you after picking mine back up after getting my new remote it felt so cheap. And that screen!
I’m in the same boat with my new remote too though. I am really excited about it but it’s not perfect yet.
I may not have fully understood what you meant. Very interesting.
The Harmony Hub integration in Home Assistant only exposes Activities which I suppose could be triggered by the Remote Two. However, I would not be able to change channels, play/pause, change volume, etc. I do have Media Players in HA for my TV (LG), AVR (Pioneer/Onkyo) and Streamer (Nvidia Shield Pro), but they don’t have entities except Power On and Off.
I will investigate whether the RM4 Pro can replicate the Harmony Hub, and then see if that can be controlled by Home Assistant which then could be triggered by the Remote Two with appropriate button mappings. I’ll let you know how I get on.
I am still learning and working out what is possible (and the right terminology!) but I am pretty sure what you are asking is able to be implemented. Apologies if you know all this…
Add any REMOTES you need (i.e. to control volume etc.). The learning process can be a bit tedious but works.
Add any INTEGRATIONS that expose ENTITIES you need to access
Optionally create any MACROS you need / want (i.e. direct channel access)
Create your ACTIVITY, bring in ANY of the ENTITIES (incl. REMOTE(S), MACRO(S)), you need (you can add later)
Optionally create the ON SEQUENCE / OFF SEQUENCE (i don’t use)
Click on the “EDIT USER INTERFACE” (white background button in the top left) and you can set up the remote exactly how you want it. You can map COMMANDS from ANY of the ENTITIES you have exposed to the ACTIVITY.
Go to USER INTERFACE and add a PAGE (or use existing)
Search for your newly created ACTIVITY in the ENTITIES tab on the right, drag this onto the remote
Make sure you get the “Changes are saved” message pop up at the bottom of the screen.
On the Remote, Navigate to the page you created, select the ACTIVITY and the remote will now function exactly as you set up in Step 6
I might be stupid, it took me a little bit of time to understand the workflow but once understood I was almost able to move to the UCR2 as my prime remote (still have some wifi issues - is rock solid if using ethernet however waf is low if I leave a 10m cable running across the room…).
You’re pretty far from stupid to have worked that out without any user manual (yet)!
Many thanks for such clear, detailed instructions.
Add any REMOTES: Can the R2 learn commands to control devices over IP, or does it only learn IR codes?
Add any INTEGRATIONS: This is my main problem. There are no integrations available for my media devices. I have: LG OLED TV, Sky Q satellite box, Pioneer (Onkyo) AVR and Nvidia Shield Pro. I have installed the R2 integration for Home Assistant which works great. Also the Android TV integration in the hope that it would control my Shield, but it doesn’t.
I need to control all of these through the internet (or Bluetooth if it is within range). As I said earlier, I can’t rely on IR as my dock is connected via Ethernet and sits on the cabinet above the media devices. That is where my Ethernet ports are. I can use IR extenders, but they would have to be in front of the cabinet with trailing wires. My wife is like yours and would not allow that.
I know it is planned that eventually the remote itself will transmit IR codes, but my family are spoiled by the Harmony Elite which does not need to be pointed at the equipment. I would constantly get called in to ‘fix’ things when some devices fail to respond to remote button presses.
I love this remote and badly want it to replace my Harmony, but I fear it will be a very long time before that is a reality. I am still a faithful customer though, and will see it through!
Only learns IR codes for now. I believe BT is on the roadmap. I have moved one of my devices from BT to IR for now (only give up voice control for TV which I don’t personally use).
My setup is similar (without the AVR, I am on Sonos). I have a mix of the UCR2 native Android TV integration, learnt remotes (TV and STB) and a bunch of ENTITIES exposed via the UCR2 HA Integration in my ACTIVITY.
My config is:
In Home Assistant i have installed and configured integrations for Sonos, Automate Pulse (blinds), Zimi (lights), AirTouch (aircon). This creates a bunch of ENTITIES within Home Assistant.
On the UCR2 I’ve installed the Home Assistant Integration, I have over 300 available entities [INTEGRATIONS>HOME ASSISTANT>AVAILABLE ENTITIES]. I’ve dragged any I want to access into the [INTEGRATIONS>HOME ASSISTANT>CONFIGURED ENTITIES] column.
From here I have just followed the steps detailed above.
Again, I might be telling you stuff you already know but I have searched and can see there are various Onkyo, Nvidia and LG integrations available for Home Assistant. I would start by configuring them in Home Assistant and see if you can control your devices natively from Home Assistant. If you can, you should be set.
Perhaps you have tried these and they don’t expose the ENTITIES you need in which case I would probably try getting support from the Home Assistant community as it is likely you will get quicker progress there (much larger developer / user base).
THE UCR2 is cool but it is going to force me to get structure in my configuration . At this early stage I am thinking I will probably adopt a Home Assistant first approach, meaning I would prefer to run integrations and expose entities from within Home Assistant wherever possibly before installing native UCR2 integrations.
Mine is on its way with ups and will arrive Monday. I’m also coming from a Harmony Elite.
I totally understand that it will not be a 1:1 setup, but I hope in the future it will work like a Harmony. I don’t have home assistant or other stuff. Just want to control my home theater system: Sony OLED, Marants and KEF setup. Spotify and Hue integration would be very nice.
You mentioned not being able to change channels with the Harmony integration in Home Assistant. However it does expose a Remote entity that can be used to send any of the commands that you have on the Harmony. Unfortunately Home Assistant does not have a card or something with all those buttons, but you can use services to send them.
Check the documentation, specifically send_command and change_channel (and the config file section on how to find the names of the commands for your devices)
(as a disclaimer I am assuming you can call those services from the remote, I don’t have mine yet, so cant try)
You are correct. I never realised that HA had all the Harmony devices and commands stored as they are not exposed as normal entities.
It does mean I can’t retire the Harmony hub yet, but at least I can program and use the R2 as a replacement for the Elite remote. Until proper R2 integrations are created and shared for all my media devices.
Now all I have to do is create dozens of scripts in HA that call individual services so I can map buttons on the R2. If I can figure out how to map a different set of buttons for each activity…
Well, I’ve managed to create Activities in the R2 that fire off my Activities in the Harmony via Home Assistant using scripts.
But, I can’t map Home Assistant entities (scripts) to individual buttons on the R2 so I can control Volume, Cursor, etc. It seems that, for now, you can only map IR commands which is a no go for me.
I guess you could map them inside Macros and then you could map the Macro instead of the IR command, like i’m doing it for managing my favorite tv channels as it’s not a simple IR command
First of all create your Macro, after that you can use this as an entity inside the specific Activity. In my example i have a Macro for changing the TV Channel (triggers 1-2 IR commands in a row) - but should be also doable with HomeAssistant Scripts.
Inside the activity you can then map the Macro to a specific button, maybe this is working for your intention
Please not that my Macros, e.g. “Kabel1” is displayed as activity in my screenshots, guess it’s a bug with the naming
. At this early stage I am thinking I will probably adopt a Home Assistant first approach, meaning I would prefer to run integrations and expose entities from within Home Assistant wherever possibly before installing native UCR2 integrations.
