Replacement for the harmony?

[Hauteknits]

Just found out that Logitech was discontinuing the harmony remote on the latest LTT vid. I'm a college student and run a small in-house IT business, and I always preached the harmony as the universal remote go-to, because it was the only thing I could get at best-buy and setup same day. Most universal remote solutions seem to require you to be a dealer. Is there anything that's DIY-esque that comes close to the Harmony? My favorite remote was the Harmony companion, it was perfect for elders because you couldn't f*** it up (this is TV, this is your DVD player, no fancy screens), but you also had the Elite for the more advanced, millennial type customers. I know that there's still stock availble and Harmony will "continue to support the remote", but we all know that's going to fall off soon.

 

So far, I've only seen the Fire TV Cube (I'd prefer to not use voice primarily) and the Caavo control center (has an OSD, not a huge fan, but seems to be the best so far)

[Alex Atkin UK]

I've been dreading this day, what with adding remotes being entirely cloud driven.  This is going to really suck.

 

Might be time to see if there is a homebrew solution with a Rasperry Pi as I mostly use the Harmony with Alexa anyway so I don't need a physical remote.

[Hauteknits]

12 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I've been dreading this day, what with adding remotes being entirely cloud driven.  This is going to really suck.

 

Might be time to see if there is a homebrew solution with a Rasperry Pi as I mostly use the Harmony with Alexa anyway so I don't need a physical remote.

Yeah, so far the homebrew solution seems like the only route, but I'd prefer a more professional solution, the remote is necessary and I haven't seen too many pi webapps that have good support (some clients really care about this)

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 4/30/2021 at 10:15 PM, Hauteknits said:

Yeah, so far the homebrew solution seems like the only route, but I'd prefer a more professional solution, the remote is necessary and I haven't seen too many pi webapps that have good support (some clients really care about this)

I'm kinda hoping once they close down the website for good (they say the service will keep working indefinitely at this point) they will do the right thing and let the community take over.

Its doubly annoying as a lot of devices had network control a few years back and have since been locked down due to not bothering to make their APIs secure, the Hub itself included.  So there could have been other options.

I'm kinda surprised nobody has come up with a unified standard API for all devices to communicate a home automation system, maybe this will be the push to get that off the ground?