Challenges when trying to add IR Remote

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Hey everyone,

I am trying to add IR Remotes and I face the following 2 challenges:

  1. In the Customer Remote, I only have 3 buttons available. Toggle, On and Off. Ideally I want multiple buttons to replicate a full TV Remote, like Volume, and Numbers. Is there a way to make that happen?

  2. I have a projector that I do not have the Remote for - thus i can’t press the button for it to learn. Is there any way to manually add the signal/frequency (I have a different Smart IR that works but I want to move it to Bond Bridge)

Thanks

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We don’t give custom buttons in the app because we strive for “feature parity” between what you can control in the app vs voice assistant and integrations like Home Assistant. Supporting “Volume” etc. would require programming against those APIs on the Alexa/Google side, which would require a concerted effort and maintenance over time, only worth it if we could really advertise the product as a Harmony replacement.

There is a hack you can use today, and actually get Alexa/Google Home control: create a device called “TV Channel 7” and program TurnOn to be the Channel 7 button. Then you can say “Alexa, turn on TV Channel 7” and it will send that button. — Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well for complex remotes. Hence the exceedingly complex project that Harmony attempted of understanding the complexities of all these remotes <> TV interfaces.

Technically, yes, but it’s not easy. You could use the Open Local API (http://docs-local.appbond.com/). Here’s basically how you’d do it:

  1. Experiment with sending signals without creating a device, just to see that you can get it to work. PUT v2/signal/tx {...}. You would need to convert the signal that you have on the other system into binary encoding with some bps. (doc: Bond Local API)

  2. Once you have proof-of-concept there, you could then use the API to create a device and add commands & signals. You could also do it via the app with dummy signals from another IR device, and then just PATCH the devices/x/commands/x/signal endpoint to change the data/bps fields.

OR… maybe you can put the “Smart IR” close to the Bond Bridge, and use the Smart IR as a transmitter and just let the Bond Bridge record those transmissions as part of the setup of the new device. No API coding required :slight_smile:

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If you do not care about voice assistant integration, you can see how some of us have bent and nearly broken the built in device types to handle generic devices with more buttons, with a decent amount of legwork to rename and update things via command line API calls.

Unable to learn dyson remote

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Thank you both very much.

Explanation helps me understand the why and the 2 solutions suggested are good enough to achieve the basics.

I think I will create a separate device for Volume Up / Down, and one for Channel Up / Down that would be compatible with Voice if/When I go down that road as well.

Then , for more complex things like numbers of channels I can use the 2nd solution. I had done part of it already but the renaming makes it helpful

Finally, I am moving everything to Hubitat so having things be a bit messy in the Bond Bridge is not an important problem.

Thanks again everyone :slight_smile:

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