Problem with switching Harmony activities

#1

I’m trying to set up a way to reset a harmony activity so that it can be activated repeatedly. Aside from the ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS way that Logitech doesn’t allow the power off command to be disabled in an activity…

My first thought was to create a “null” activity that does nothing, and switch to it any time the Hub’s activities property changes… then turn off the rest of the activities. That way, there is still a current activity (the null activity). This basically works, except setting the activitiy to “null” re-fires the piston and then it all falls apart.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to prevent the piston from running if the new activity is “null”, but weird things still happen. Sometimes activities are left on, and sometimes the power still goes off even though “null” was called before any activities were turned off.

(FWIW, I have the device options in Harmony set to only power off if the power button is pushed)

This is my latest, with some of the stuff I’ve tried still in there but disabled. I tried setting everything to devices instead of strings, various ways of testing the activity, different execution and cancellation policies, etc. … and just can’t get it to dance.

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Has anyone got a working method for this? It has to be one of the most common problems there is with a Harmony, but I can’t find anything.

Why they don’t just allow a simple disable of that silly power off function in an activity is beyond me. :rage:

#2

I struggled with this too, and share your thoughts on Logitech’s limitations and implementations. They make simple things very hard to accomplish with their system!

The way I worked around it was by setting Harmony to “never turn off” (which in practice for what we’re doing should accomplish the same thing), and then set my “Power On” and “Power Off” activities to the exact same steps. In my piston, rather than “power on” or “power off”, I used Toggle.

I’m not sure I understand your implementation exactly - if the above isn’t applicable, can you explain it a bit and I’ll see if I can help think of another solution?

It’s a stupid workaround and frustrating to have to do it, but it has been working.

One thing I struggled with for a while, even if you tell Harmony not to turn devices off, the “off” step still shows in your activity sequence, it’s just not executed.