[APP][Pro] Harmony Hub (v2.0.7)

Great.
tnx for looking into this.

@DavidN/@Fire69 After some thorough testing (even used tinfoil to make the hub lose connection) I have found that the library I am using to discover hubs on your home network might cause the app crashes and will overflood your hub with connections.

If the connection of your hub to the wifi network is stable enough it won’t cause this kind of problems, once the connection becomes unstable this app will make it worse by trying to connect in a very aggressive way and eventually smother it completely.

I will rewrite the discovery module and get rid of the external library, this will be included in the next version. Luckily while writing a new app (generic DLNA app) I already did most of this work.

Will keep you informed on my progress.

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I’ve got red exclamation marks in the devices using the Harmony Hub app right now. They don’t seem to respond correctly in the experimental ‘devices’ of Homey.

I’m using the experimental V2.0.1 and tried to restart the app, but it didn’t work out.

When you click on a device with exclamation mark, does it state that your hub is offline?

Yep, thats true. Fixed now.

I am working on an improved discovery method that will replace an external library I am currently using. At the moment it considers the hub offline if it didn’t respond on a broadcast message for 5 seconds, and sets the device to unavailable.

I plan to use a different approach for this that only uses the broadcasts for the discovery of new hubs but determines the online/offline state on the socket connection that gets opened right after discovery, this should be a more reliable solution.

Technical details

The broadcast message is send over UDP because this protocol doesn’t have any delivery guarantees a UDP package might get lost. The broadcast is sent once every second if a package gets lost 5 times the app considers the hub offline. WLAN usually have a higher package loss rate than LAN.

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@jreenen I finally had time to play with the new activities as devices. I added all my activities but it turns out only watching TV is recognized and has the TV device class. It would be great though if at least all activities have the on/off capability so I can use that in flows to check if that activity is currently active (as a condition). Is this something you can implement?

This seems to be possible?

I can make a flow for example IF … AND watch movie is on THEN …

Perhaps only on v2.x then?

Possibly. Can’t go back to test that :yum:

@Phuturist you might be right on that, unfortunately, at the moment I don’t have a second Homey to keep both versions supported :frowning:

How is the capability support on devices for this app on firmware 1.5.x?

The TV class is only used for harmony hub devices that are marked as a virtual television, this to prevent all activities firing when you ask homey to turn on/off the TV.

I understand. I’m still far from convinced that upgrading to 2.x will do me any good though.

The support for capabilities of the activity devices seems to be limited to only my “watch TV” activity while “watch Netflix” which is pretty much the same activity but is added but without any capabilities. Adding the device as stand alone still seems to work nice under 1.5.x. But as mentioned I was hoping to check in flows if a certain activity is running with the on/off capability (I’m using BL variables now to keep track). On 1.5.x or my Harmony Hub this only seems to work for my “watch TV” activity. How do you determine if a activity should use the tv device class?

The activity on the harmony hub has a type if that type equals VirtualTelevisionN the TV class gets added.

Now that I am looking at my app.json I see that for activities I no longer added the mobile cards (those are no longer used for v2), to give you onoff support on v1.5.x it might be as simple as adding those again, will do so in the upcoming version.

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I’ve got this problem now. The harmony iPhone app seems to be working correctly but the homey app doesn’t seem to make a connection… tried to restart the app but that didn’t work out.

image

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@Joep_Vullings I am nearing completion of an updated version of the app that would probably solve this issue.

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restart your harmony

Did that several times.

I’ve got a question about the app. I was missing an activity. In the hope to add that, I removed the complete app and reinstalled it. But now, every time I’m trying to add a device or activity, it will find the harmony hub, but after that I get a timeout. I’ve restarted the homey, hub and my router but no luck. Can anybody help me with this? Thanks in advance!!

Ps. Thanks for making this great app!

Update; I think I found more information. It is a recent firmware upgrade in the logitech harmony:

  1. Info on Github: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/issues/21191

  2. Info from logitech community: https://community.logitech.com/s/question/0D55A00008OsX3CSAV/update-to-accessing-harmony-hubs-local-api-via-xmpp

  3. Info how to downgrade:
    https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2018/12/17/logitech-harmony-removes-local-api/

@Ranney and @All

It looks like the latest firmware upgrade for the Logitech Harmony Hub in combination with this app is causing issues. Will investigate this and hopefully provide a solution soon, will keep you all posted.

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Thanks for your replay!

Enabling the XMPP option in the new firmware will not fix the problem. For now, I’ve made some changes in the activities and after that I downgraded the firmware. (Making changes will automatically update the firmware…) Everything is now working again. For now I’ve blocked internet access for the hub. Hopefully a better solution in the near future!