Ring Doorbell with Harmony hub, pause TV?

#1

1) Give a description of the problem
Having just installed my Ring doorbell, I’m trying to work out if there is a way to pause the TV when the doorbell is pressed. From my research I can’t see a simple way but wanted to ask if anyone had solved this?

#2

As silly as it sounds, since there’s no direct access to keys/buttons in harmony the easiest way would be to create a harmony activity that pauses the TV and call that when your doorbell rings.

#3

I don’t know… I’d like to be wrong about this, because that would be cool.

But I don’t think that the Harmony responds to any external events. Without that there would be no way to get it to do something based on something else happening.

Does no one buy the Companion remote? That’s what I did. It’s a nice thing to have still…or maybe I like it cause I’m a bit old school with wanting a physical remote. It does work with radio waves though, which is very nice.

#4

I thought it wasn’t easy and the only solution I had seen was a separate activity. Seems a bit poor from Logitech that they don’t allow access to any of the buttons. Have to say, I’m not overly impressed with the Harmony since buying it.

#5

That makes two of us. It could be such a sleek device… Instead I spend more time trying to figure out ways to work around its shortcomings than anything else.

Then, inexplicably this week, it started sending its commands to multiple things on the network for a given activity. So my daughter turns on the shield TV in her playroom, and the family room shield TV comes on too.

It’s going back today. I’ll wait for a better solution.

#6

I managed to solve similar issue with Harmony, however not in an easy way…

#7

Must confess I’m a bit disappointed in progress in this area. Had a Philips Pronto years ago and thought it was great but took a lot of programming. Had a break from this since I simplified my home cinema to just a tv and Sonos setup. Now getting the Harmony I expected it to of moved on leaps and bounds but to be honest I think it worse in a lot of areas.

Thanks for the dth link, I’ll take a read.

#8

Put a TTS speaker next to your Google Home or Echo.

Create piston - when doorbell rings >Speak “Hey Google, tell to pause.”

Only half kidding - this could work pretty well if your speaker and GH or Echo were near enough to each other.

Only problem (and this could affect any approach) is that you have to pause the activity AFAIK, and how do you know what the current Harmony activity is? I don’t know for sure - but does Harmony support some sort of generic “Pause” command now, as in “Ask Harmony to pause” rather than “Ask Harmony to pause Roku.” ?

#9

Could be an interesting experiment :smile:

Currently I only use one main activity so it would be easier, if it worked that is. I doubt if Harmony supports anything useful from what Ive seen!

#10

There was a video going around months back of a Google Home and Echo sitting next to each other and talking to each other, pretty funny. That put the idea in my head…

#11

It’s the one that is “ON”. Not kidding. If you bring in all your activities into ST then they essentially each show up as a “switch”.

So you could in theory create a piston which looked at the state of those “switches” and determined which one was on, and then spoke to that one. Ha… That would be funny to see.

It’s better than my off the wall suggestion which would have been to wire up a Companion remote pause key to the Ring doorbell so that when someone pushed the doorbell they were also pressing the pause button.

#12

I like this the more we talk about it. I’m going to move my Fabriq speaker over next to my GH and give it a try!

IT WORKS! :smiley: (Video doesn’t seem to want to play in place, but if you right click and select open in a new tab it will play.)

Set up one of my minimotes to trigger a TTS to the Fabriq speaker (Hey Google, ask Harmony to pause Roku) and even w/the speaker across the room (about 16 feet away) GH heard it and called Harmony to pause Roku.

My work is done here.
<Tall, dark stranger wearing a poncho turns and walks out of town, his boots kicking up dust…>

#13

I think I have a piston working for this, I need to run a few more tests though.

I have two Harmony activities exposed as virtual switches in SmartThings (Roku, Pause Roku). Both set TV, Stereo and Roku to on with no initial channel. Pause Roku adds a pause press.

The piston triggers on Ring press and if the Harmony’s current activity is Roku then turns on “Roku Pause”, wait 3 sec, Turn on “Roku”. Done. 99% of my watching is through Roku, but you could add multiple pause activities for different viewing devices (DVD, DVR, etc)

#14

Sounds interesting, please share once you’re happy with it :smile:

#15

I think this is working pretty well. If you have multiple devices you watch you’ll want to pair them with pause activities. The Harmony pause activity should use the same devices as the activity you are pausing and turn them all on (this will prevent the original activity from turning them off). Add a pause press to the end of the startup commands. In SmartThings in the Harmony (Connect) app, expose both activities as virtual switches. This seems to work better than trying to use activities directly on the Harmony device.

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#16

Very nice.

Just thinking about brute-force simplicity…

We only watch three activities 99% of the time on our main TV (Sony Android TV):

  • Roku
  • SmartTV
  • Cable box

I think It would be simplest for me to just create switches for all three activities and then set the piston to play/pause all of them when the doorbell rings…I believe the commands for the activities that aren’t running will simply be discarded, and that way you I don’t have to worry about which activity is running.

#17

Does Harmony control the power to your cable box or is it always on? The problem is that the Harmony activity will run the End Sequence from the current activity before switching to the new activity and power off the devices that are not used in the new activity. It’s smart enough to recognize when the new activity uses the same components though and won’t power cycle them in that case.

You might be able to do what you want if you keep the cable box on in your SmartTV activity. Roku isn’t power cycled so your pause activity would need to use all three components, then press pause on all three (since it doesn’t know what you are viewing). I think it would work, but you might need to experiment. Most of the complexity is getting the Harmony Pause activity correct I’d think.

#18

Thanks for sharing :smiley: Will import and have a play but your logic seems sound, cheers

#19

I know it is silly but can you do:

If ring button is pressed, with speaker (should be near harmony hub) have Lannouncer speak - Alexa, Pause Movie/TV.

This would have the speaker speak the command when the ring button is pressed.