Well, although there are still some open issues with the R2 I have managed to get it working to fully replace my Harmony Elite and the Elite has now been officially retired!
But there is one more thing I would like to do. I saw the attached image in a YouTube video about the R2 and its showing a graphical control for lights. I have some lights and a thermostat available on Home Assistant and they are controllable via the R2 but only with binary functions, such as ON or OFF, even though they are controllable on HA with a graphical control.
How do I create a graphical control like in the image on the R2?
Could you please elaborate for me as I am very new to HA and it took quite a while for me to just get it to work with R2. The dimmer and thermostat show up in HA with graphical controls but only shows in R2 with ON or OFF.
I don’t think your problem comes from HA : you want to have the advanced controls of your entities over just the on/off switch. If inside HA you can control a thermostat or a shutter or a light, you should be able to control it the same way from the remote.
These controls are available only in pages, not inside activities (only toggle on/off is possible inside activities)
You should be able to see the entity type from its logo like here for a thermostat.
And then drop it in a page so that you can control it.
One more thing : if you press the left part of the row on the icon, it will just toggle it, whereas if you press the text part it will open the expected control
AMAZING - IT WORKED!!! The wealth of knowledge in this forum is FANTASTIC! I can simply say that if this forum did not exist my R2 would never have been workable and would have ended up hidden somewhere in the back of a closet!
I still would have preferred to be able to control the thermostat from within an Activity but i was amazed how simple it was to get it to work. I simply made a new page and added the thermostat entity from HA onto the page. It did correctly show the thermometer icon and the entity’s name but didn’t show any kind of control. The only editing i could do was to change the name. But then i went to the R2 and opened that page, tapped on the icon and son-of-gun there was a number showing the temp setting, a - and +, a smaller number showing the room temp and at the bottom the mode the thermostat was in and tapping on that can change the mode. I gave it a try and all aspects of it worked. REALLY PLEASED!!!
Last question. Is there any way in an Activity to jump to a page and then from that page jump back to the Activity.
THANKS FOR THE HELP - I REALLY APPRECIATED IT!!!
Gerry
Any running activities and devices will show up in the bottom bar that you can swipe up on any profile page from the bottom. You should see a white line if there is any running device or activity. You can also access any entity from an activity by taping on the top bar inside an activity.
You have helped me in the past and you’ve done it again! I simply added the two thermostat entities into the activities and then when I tap on the top bar I can tap on either of the thermostats and go right to its control to make changes. Then I tap on the X and another tap at the top and I’m right back to my activity! EXCELLENT - Thanks again!
Brainguynyc:
While i didn’t take any Motrin I did have some VERY VERY FRUSTRATING parts of getting the R2 to do what I wanted. And, again, if it wasn’t for this forum I would never have gotten it to work!
Is this graphical control through HA state aware? That is, can you walk over to another dimmer, change it, and have it update on the remote? I would love to have state aware controls for all my devices. Obviously, it’s a non-starter for IR control, since it only works one way.
I installed OpenHab on a Raspberry Pi ages ago, before I received my R2. OpenHab does have an “entity” (they call them “bindings”) for one of my a/v devices. HA doesn’t have any. So I would have to learn to write my own. UC is not (yet) supporting OpenHab. I might change the Pi to HA (I would just have to burn another SD card). The documentation seems to be less of a heavy lift than OpenHab. With any of these options, I would have my work cut out for me.
My dimmers are not fully supported on HA but I can access them on HA via Google Home where I send them a text representing what I would say to a Google speaker - something like “turn light to 20%”. So I don’t have a graphical of my dimmers but I actually prefer setting them to a specific level.
Where I do have graphical control is with my thermostats. This was totally a bonus as I had no idea I could do it. But when I set up my HA Green it scanned for supported devices on my network and found the thermostats. So after I got all the other stuff working on HA I figured I would give the thermostats a try. So I set them up on HA then went into R2 and introduced their entities into an Activity but only got on and off. Then a post here told me to set up the entities on a new page and lo and behold there was a graphical control for all 3 thermostats. I can see the room temp, can set the thermostat temp up or down and can set the mode (heat, cool, or off). And yes, if I go to the thermostat and make a change there it is reflected on R2 within a second or so. So i guess that would be what you are calling state aware.
Of course all of this this may depend on the device you are trying to control.
