High-end products from Crestron and such persist, if you’ve got a thousand dollars to spare. Amazon’s Fire Cube thinks your smart remote should be your voice, which like most things that involve a lot of yelling gets old pretty quickly. A couple of companies, most notably Caavo and Sevenhugs, are still trying to make variations on the smart remote work. You can still easily find a much more basic universal remote-for cheap-at a big-box electronics store. Universal remote buying guides, to the extent anyone produces them anymore, typically comprise various tiers of Logitech devices.
#Logitech harmony and remote buddy tv
A remote that you can program to execute a cascading sequence of actions-turn on the TV and the Blu-ray player and switch the input and start the movie-with the press of a single button.
If anything, it’s surprising that Harmony lasted as long as it did.Īnd now that it’s gone? That’s pretty much it for the smart remote, at least in the way that Harmony embodied it: a single controller to rule them all, with its own interface and touchscreen and deep bank of devices burned into its digital brain. The writing has been on the wall, the floors, the ceiling, the sconces, you get it. Logitech hadn’t released a new Harmony device since April 2019, and CEO Bracken Darrell first suggested he might jettison the entire line six years before that. That last Friday’s announcement came as an unceremonious post in the Logitech support forums speaks to just how little the company has valued Harmony in recent years. Sent to that big charging cradle in the sky. It would sell off whatever stock remained and keep adding to its sprawling database of supported devices. A client had sent him word that the company was giving up on the product line and that it would no longer manufacture what had become the gold standard in remote controls. “They finally did it.”įor the past decade, Werthauer has run a repair store for Logitech Harmony remotes out of his home on Long Island. “Oh, shit,” he thought as he read the email on his phone. If (HarmonyState = "PowerOff" & Cinema_Mode.Quin Werthauer was enjoying a cup of coffee in his kitchen when he got the news. Var String HarmonyState = Harmony_Current_() Rule "Turn off Cinema Mode when powering off Harmony" String Harmony_Press_Projector_Off "Projector Off" (gAll)
You don’t need the hub configured, the item we sent the ON request to is a dummy item and is not linked to any binding. Then in the “execute the following actions” part of the macro I add a new action and select “Execute Shell Script” #!/bin/bashĬurl -header "Content-Type: text/plain" -request POST -data "ON" If the Flirc side of things is working, this should fill in the hot keys correctly. Using the Harmony remote press the button you just set in Flirc (vera link). In Keyboard Maestro icreate a new macro and say I want it to be triggered by a “hot key”.Ĭlick the mouse inside the “this hot key” box and then Keyboard Maestro is waiting for you to press the keyboard combination you want it to be triggered on. I select the Panasonic TC-P65VT30 “device” which I have already added to my Harmony (I also renamed it Flirc), I press the “vera link” button (though it could be any button).įlirc flashes to say it has added it. Yes it might sound like a lot of faffing, and it is, but it works and is very flexible. So whilst the API is a little lacking, you can easily hook several things together.
Turn on the fan via a remote power switch from the remote. I also use the Harmony to control individually the volume levels of Squeezelite and Kodi. Once the buttons are in the Harmony Hub I can use openHAB to simulate presses.Į.g I have a “good night” sequence in openHAB that i trigger with HomeKit, it starts to dim the lights downstairs, lights the bedroom and landing, checks to see if the harmony states that an activity is running (and which one) then powers it all off. Keyboard Maestro lets me do anything, I can fire a shell script to send a http request to openHAB, open an Application, send shortcuts specifically to an application. (I don’t know if you have a Mac, if not I am sure there are equivalent applications for whatever platform you need)
#Logitech harmony and remote buddy mac
Then, I use Keyboard Maestro (though any custom keyboard shortcut trigger thing will work like BetterTouchTool, Script Events, even the built in Mac system prefs) to do something when those keys are pressed.