Control your TV/Home Cinema using Siri and Logitech Harmony.

Home Cinema

In this article

Voice

Homebridge

Activities

Control

Voice-controlling your home cinema

If you’re like me and have a keen interest in both home cinema and home automation – you may want to be able to control your devices using your voice.

Unfortunately, there’s no native option for this in the HomeKit ecosystem so we’ll be looking at some workaround options here. A while back I managed to grab a Harmony Elite on Prime Day. This is a great device in itself that allows you to control all your home cinema devices through one remote.

Connecting Harmony to HomeKit with Homebridge

Luckily we also have a Homebridge plugin that connects Harmony to your HomeKit system. Let’s get started.

We’re relying on using Homebridge so if you haven’t got this set up, follow my guide here.

First, we’re going to install the homebridge plugin. Note that this is a relatively new plugin by Nicolas Dujardin that uses web sockets, the previous plugin that I was using was broken recently due to Logitech closing access to private local API controls.

I digress.

npm install -g homebridge-harmony

Now we’re going to want to add the configuration to our HomeKit config file, if you followed my guide that will be located in ‘/var/homebridge/config.json’.

You’ll need to add the following:

Homebridge config

123456789101112

"platforms":[
   {
      "platform":"HarmonyHubWebSocket",
      "name":"HarmonyHub (Your Hub Name)",
      "hubIP":"YOUR.HUB.IP.ADDRESS",
      "showTurnOffActivity":true,
      "refreshTimer":30,
      "skipedIfSameStateActivities":[
         "PowerOff"
      ]
   }
]

All we need to do now is restart homebridge

sudo service homebridge restart

Head over to your Home app, and you should see your Harmony activities in your default room, or the room that your Homebridge hub is allocated to.

These are now switches that you can turn off and on either via the Home app or using Siri. If you have a HomePod this works brilliantly.

Creating and using activities

Here’s a couple of example activities that I have:

Movie

Turn on TV
Turn on AVR and set input to Bluray
Turn on nVidia Shield

Netflix

Turn on TV
Turn on AVR and set input to Media Player
Turn on Apple TV

Turn on TV
Turn on AVR and set input to Satellite
Turn on Sky Q

Expanding what you can control

You can even create activities to tune in to certain channels. So if you had an activity that tuned in to BBC 1, you could also use Siri to do this. There are so many possibilities to this action, Harmony can control Philips Hue so you can dim your lights using this. Personally I prefer to keep all my automation related actions within the Home app, as I also have IKEA Tradfri bulbs around the house to control too.

Voila