I would like to bind my Harmony Companion physical remote “home control” buttons in order to control my openHAB items. @sam greatly describes here how to be able to bind regular buttons that are “inside an activity” but it doesn’t work for the Companion “home control” physical buttons because I don’t have a real “home control” device that Harmony understand (actually they are only Philips Hue, Hunter Douglas Powerview Hub or Lifx Smart bulbs) so that they are disabled.
I’m wondering if any of you have a trick for enabling these buttons so that I can use them inside openHAB.
You need to run a fake Hue bridge that the Harmony can pair to, the fake bridge can then talk to OpenHAB. People use similar methods to get Amazon Echo to send commands.
This thread is worth a read
(and you thought my Flirc method was long winded )
Depending on what you ultimately want to do with the buttons, it might be worth picking up a Hue Starter Kit. It is Prime day on Amazon today and starter kits (three colour bulbs and a bridge) are going for £99 (usually £150)
Thank you very much, I will read the thread and try to install the fake HA bridge, I guess once I have opened it and activated inside Harmony Hub I will be able to use the remote buttons even if I don’t have the bridge opened any more… I will try.
Hahaha, yes, I was trying to avoid your Flirc method and I’m slowly arriving to it
You do need the HA bridge running all the time. The Harmony will add it as a device and send commands to it, the bridge will then send the commands to whatever it is told to. It “bridges” the gaps between devices that wouldn’t usually talk to each other.
