Buttons for Roku and Receiver?

1

nice and clean. Just curious how you ‘stitched’ this together. Do you have all smart devices or did you use Harmony hub, IR bridges, etc? Main reason is because I have an old Harmony and some IR components, but still difficult to rely on it. thanks for sharing

2

Thanks Mark,
My system consists of

  1. A 2 zone Yamaha receiver for source control in the Great Room and Patio. I can play the same source in both places or different one
  2. A Roku Ultra plugged into the Yamaha for streaming apps
  3. An HDHomeRun plugged into the Yamaha for decoding OTA TV
  4. A Vizio TV in the Great Room
  5. A Vizio TV on the patio
  6. A Roku TV and a Yamaha MusicCast speaker in the Bedroom

I control the Yamaha and Roku devices using TAustin’s Web Requestor Multi Edge Driver. The Vizio TVs don’t have an open API that I’ve found, so I have an virtual Alexa contact sensor that runs an Alexa routine to turn the TVs on or off.

I can cycle through all the rooms clicking on the Select Room to Control button. Clicking on any [Room] Source button brings up a dashboard that shows all sources available in each room.

Since sources and power can also be controlled via the remotes or Alexa, I poll the system every 2 minutes to make sure sources and power status are sync’d

With a WiFi to IR blaster that has an open API, you could control any IR device using a similar setup.

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3

@John_Magrane how did you create the buttons for the Roku and receiver commands? I am wanting to do something similar but I’m struggling to find how to create the buttons for each Roku and receiver command with my ST driver devices and Sharptools.

4

Philip,
I connect to the Roku devices using TAustin’s Roku Edge Driver and talk to the MusicCast cast devices using TAustin’s Web Requestor Multi Edge Driver.

I created a SharpTools rule for each function (e.g. selecting a streaming service on the Roku, Roku up/down/select, changing volume or input on the receiver, etc) then each function gets a SharpTools Rules button on the dashboard. Hitting the button executes the rule.

The Roku streaming services are accessed using the playPreset command with the appropriate channel code. You can get the channel code for all your installed services by querying your Roku
[roku device is address]:8060/query/apps

The Roku remote commands are accessed using the selectKey command.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

John

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5

Thanks! That’s where I was headed in my brain, but making the rules were stumping me. Is there no trigger, just a flow?

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Correct. The rule has no trigger in it just the flow.

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7

Thanks! I have started to setup a dashboard for it and all is going well so far with just a bit of command troublshooting and playing with the layout. With my old non-Elite Harmony remote getting up there in age and not being happy with thre reviews for the current crop of comparable products, this looks to be a good stop-gap for the commercial products to get back to a level of Harmony products in case my remote fails anytime in the near future.

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Glad it’s working out for you. I use this as my universal remote instead of anything else.

  • a like the flexibiity to customize a dashboard for the sources used in each room. It’s easy to add or delete a source. Also I don’t have to scroll through Roku menus to select one.

Two other small things I do (that might not be pertinent to you)

  1. The power button turns on the receiver and TV. My Vizio TVs don’t have an open API so I can’t control them directly with SharpTools. I created a virtual Alexa contact sensor that gets opened and closed and this triggers an Alexa routine to turn the TV off and on.
  2. Since it’s possible to control things with their actual remote or use an Alexa command (eg Alexa play Pandora in the Great Room), the dashboard can get out of sync with the actual state of things. I poll the receiver and Rokus every few minutes and update the dashboard as necessary.
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John,

FYI, The Google Home integration with Vizio TVs is slightly better that Alexa’s. You can use your virtual switch to trigger the following with GH:

Screenshot_20240111-134848
Screenshot_20240111-1348481200×845 30.8 KB

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Thanks for the info Paul. All I need to do is turn the TV on or off and everything else is the receiver or Roku which works great in Sharptools.

11

@josh is it possible to do a custom footer for rule tiles that wouldn’t normally have any default footer?

For my home theater control dashboard that only uses rule tiles, I can think of a few that I might like to add some footer text for additional cues on function for infrequent guests to better know how to operate the system without feeling intimidated.

Is this possible out of the box with an option that I’m missing or would I need to do a custom tile?

12

The default rule tile doesn’t have an option for displaying text in the footer.

You could use a Super Tile if you wanted to customize the type of content and layout of things. That’s a great approach for a few one-off tiles, but probably wouldn’t scale well if you have lots and lots of rule tiles you want to make that type of customization to.

One of the neat use-cases for a Super Tile is combining multiple items together. For example, I sometimes use them when I want to have a list of hyperlinks or dashboard links on a single tile.

As you alluded to, you could use a Custom Tile for this, but it would require some developer skills and you would likely need to add an HTTP Trigger to each rule you wanted to trigger.

Alternatively, any of the tiles that support Hyperlink Actions can use the special $.runRule("RULEID") hyperlink syntax to run a rule.

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