LIFX Bridge vs Harmony Hub, what's the difference?

Posted on
Tue Nov 15, 2016 4:06 pm
FlyingDiver offline
User avatar
Posts: 7189
Joined: Jun 07, 2014
Location: Southwest Florida, USA

LIFX Bridge vs Harmony Hub, what's the difference?

When I first released these, there was a lot of confusion about them. So I'm going to summarize what each does, and how they work together (or don't).

The Harmony Hub plugin is pretty straightforward. It lets you know when your Hub has commanded an activity change, including a PowerOff command for the system. So you can create triggers and perform other Indigo controlled actions based on what Activity your Harmony setup is currently running. Most people use this to set lights, etc, for home theatre activities.

You can also tell the Hub to change activities or send individual device commands, so you could use Indigo (via control pages) to act as a remote for a Harmony setup.

The second part of the equation is using your Harmony remote to control Indigo, when NOT making an activity change. The Harmony system has support for a limited number of Home Automation devices. LIFX light bulbs are one of those devices, for which I was able to reverse engineer the bulb side of the communications protocol, based on their published API for writing apps to control the bulbs. So what the LIFX-Bridge plugin does is advertise Indigo devices as emulated LIFX devices. The Harmony thinks it's sending on/off commands to an LIFX devices, but it's actually sending them to the plugin, where you can control any Indigo device.

For example, I have several Lutron light/shade scenes programmed to Phantom Buttons on my Lutron repeater (controller). And using the Lutron plugin, I have those buttons defined as Indigo switches (relay devices). Using the LIFX bridge, I advertise those devices as LIFX lights, and now I can program buttons on the Harmony Companion remote to activate those scenes.

You could use one or the other of the two plugins, or both, depending on exactly what you want to accomplish.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Page 1 of 1

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests

cron