Harmonium — a Home Assistant remote framework, built on the Astrion (v0.84.1 beta out now)
This thread is half the reason this exists, so it feels right to announce it here.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been building Harmonium — an open-source Home Assistant integration that turns the Astrion (and any browser, tablet, or webview) into a fast, Harmony-style universal remote. Today I tagged the first public beta: v0.84.1, installable via HACS.
A few minutes says it better than I can:
Installing via HACS · Building a “Watch TV” activity · Listen to Music · Presets & Devices
GitHub - skavan/harmonium: HA meets remote controls in the style of Harmony · GitHub
The projects showcased in this thread rebuild the Astrion’s software natively — and they’re brilliant at it. Harmonium takes a different lane: nothing on the remote but Fully Kiosk and a web page. The engine is a single dependency-free HTML file the integration deploys to /local/harmonium/; it loads fast even on the Astrion’s stock webview, and the identical page runs on your laptop, a wall tablet, or your phone. If you can open a URL, you have a remote.
What’s inside: Activities done Harmony-style but HA-side (start/stop sequences, input switching, the D-pad handed to your Fire TV while you watch); a visual Studio editor in the HA sidebar — build screens against a live preview rendered inside a photo of your actual remote, physical buttons washed to show their bindings; a music library (Sonos / Music Assistant browsing, search, speaker grouping with per-player trim); every physical key doing something sane on every page; battery alerts that nag before the remote dies (even while it sleeps); and pairing by code — no tokens copied anywhere.
Standing on shoulders from this very thread: @thebradleysanders sideloading + KeyMapper guide is literally step 2 of our hardware setup docs, and @Marcus_Adolfsson — your wake-lock investigation in the astrion-custom README saved our batteries; you’re credited in our docs, and your finding led us to catch a second wake-lock culprit (the HA Companion app — writeup in our hardware guide). @Bae and @Aurelien_PERARD for inspiration — I’d love to compare notes, steal ideas in both directions, or save you some dead ends we’ve already paid for.
Wanted: beta testers
This is where I need you. It runs well on my two HA instances — but two houses is two houses, and yours has devices, integrations, and habits mine doesn’t. If you have an Astrion (or just a spare tablet and fifteen minutes), I’d love volunteers to:
- Install it and follow the Getting Started guide — and tell me where the docs lost you. A stranger’s first hour is the one thing I can’t test myself.
- File bugs at Issues · skavan/harmonium · GitHub — templates are set up, screenshots and HA logs welcome.
- Ask for features the same way — several of the best things in v0.84.1 (Activities flow, battery alerts, the key-binding doctrine) started as someone saying “this feels wrong.”
- Own a platform I don’t? Apple TV, Roku, webOS — teaching Harmonium a new platform is a ~15-line “dialect” (guide here), and PRs adding stock dialects make the next person’s evening.
Replies here are great too — I’ll be watching this thread.
@Charles — consider this a submission for a future showcase. 