Harmonium — a fast, activity-based universal-remote platform for the Astrion, built on Home Assistant (open beta)

Astrion
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One press says “Watch TV” — and the TV, soundbar, and inputs all obey.

That’s Harmonium: an open-source, activity-based universal remote for your whole house, built on Home Assistant and tuned for the Astrion. I announced it in the community showcase thread — but giving it a proper home here for support, feedback, and beta-tester chatter. First public beta (v0.84.1) installs via HACS today.

Harmonium Yesterday
astrion-tour
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:television: A few minutes watching short videos, says it better than I can:
Installing via HACS
Building a “Watch TV” activity
Listen to Music
Presets & Devices

The Studio — live preview inside a photo of the remote

How it works: activities live in Home Assistant — start/stop sequences, input switching, the D-pad handed to your Fire TV while you watch — and the remote is a single fast web page the integration deploys for you.

Nothing to sideload beyond Fully Kiosk; the identical page runs on your laptop, a wall tablet, or your phone. Every remote in the house agrees about what’s running. If you can open a URL, you have a remote.

You build it all visually in a Studio panel: live preview rendered inside a photo of your actual remote, physical buttons washed to show their bindings.

Also inside: a music library (Sonos / Music Assistant browse, search, speaker grouping), sane physical keys on every page, battery alerts that work while the remote sleeps, and pairing by approval code — no tokens. (And if you’re mourning a Logitech Harmony: this will feel like coming home, with your own house doing the orchestration.)

Standing on shoulders from this community: @thebradleysanders sideloading + KeyMapper guide is 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 the inspiration.

:person_raising_hand: 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. :blush:

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[Tech Talk / Demo Show] WebView Always Laggy? How We Combined HA Lovelace with Native RosCards for Seamless D-Pad Focus Tracking & Custom Hardware Mapping
Beyond the Remote: What the Community Built with Astrion
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Oh - the HA thread (which has more traffic) is here:

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Suresh, this is exactly the kind of thing we hoped would happen around Astrion.

What I find especially interesting about Harmonium is that it doesn’t really treat Astrion as a remote anymore.

It treats the remote as a physical interface to the state and intent of the home.

“Watch TV” isn’t just a button sequence. It’s an Activity that changes what the home is doing — and then the physical buttons, screen and controls adapt to that context.

That’s a very different mental model from:

Remote → Device → Command

and much closer to:

Intent → Activity → Actions → Interface

And honestly, this is one of the reasons we believe Astrion should evolve beyond the traditional “smart remote” category.

What you’re building also highlights something important for us: the most interesting software around Astrion doesn’t necessarily have to come from Sanytron.

If the hardware can become a reliable physical interface for Home Assistant, the community should be able to build experiences on top of it that we could never have designed ourselves.

That’s exactly the direction we’d like to encourage.

So please don’t think of this as competing with what we’re building. Harmonium is evidence that the platform is becoming more interesting.

And the parts you’ve built around Activities, physical button context, the Studio, and cross-device state are particularly interesting to us as we think about the next generation of Astrion.

Thank you for building this in public, documenting it properly, and — importantly — crediting the community work that came before it.

We’ll definitely consider this for a future community showcase.

And yes — we’d love to keep watching where Harmonium goes.

Astrion shouldn’t just be a remote people buy. It should become a physical interface people can build on.

— Charles

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This project is very interesting. I received my Astrion remote in July, but just started playing around with it a few weeks ago. I found the RosCard system somewhat lacking, mainly conditional cards. I looked around for alternatives and found the project by macusandolfsson with is a sideloaded android application. I forked his repo and began adding some additional features that I desired (music assistant, custom button sizes, etc). The interface is awesome, but is kinda laggy on this hardware. I mainly have wifi signal drops when performing media operations (due to large image loads), which makes the remote laggy. I have a somewhat robuts wireless network at my house, with a dedicated SSID for the astrion remote, so I don’t blame my home network. How does your interface run on this hardware? I’m looking at testing out another interface before I unleash it on the family.

Thanks

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Best to pop over to the HA forum - where some folk are up and running.

IMO its pretty darn fast. But I am bit biased.

s.

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Hello

This project look fantastic, do you plan to make a direct harmony hub intégration like this other project ? ( GitHub - dckiller51/astrion-custom-dashboard: Standalone Android app for the Sanytron Astrion HA100 remote control. Offers flexible multi-protocol control via direct Infrared (IR), Logitech Harmony Hub, or Home Assistant—used individually or all together. Built with Kotlin & Jetpack Compose. · GitHub )

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It can integrate with anything HA can integrate with (which includes Harmony Hub).
But I’m guessing you mean directly to Harmony. Since the whole thing is bound to HA – what would be the upside? Maybe I’m being dense.

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By the way big upgrade is out:

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Next version is out!