Hi all, this was discussed in some other threads but comments below kind of specific so I thought I should start a new thread.

So... Harmony Hub turned up yesterday. Cost US$96 from Amazon including shipping (latter was very cheap at $7!). It arrived 9 days before the estimated arrival date. 

Setting up was easy enough - you need to download a windows or mobile device app. The device app seems to have a couple of features that the windows app lacks. 

Seems like everything is performed over the cloud. I am sitting in my office and I can see and perform activities on the hub from here.

You add devices first. It knew in the harmony database about my Veon TV model, the MySkyHDI model and the Roku. The Veon soundbar was unknown so it walked me through capturing the IR commands it needed for that.

You then add activities and again you are walked through so pretty easy.

One really annoying issue is that once the activity is built you cannot add new devices to it. I rushed in and setup a "Watch TV" activity then subsequently realised I omitted the sound bar which needs to be switched on and to the correct input. I could not add the device to the activity. You have to delete the activity and start again. However it only took about 2 minutes to build it again.

I added Watch TV first (turn on TV, delay 25 seconds for the damn thing to fire up, set input to HDMI1, turn on Sound Bar, set to HDMI). It also adds in the turn off activity. Within the device it knows the channel buttons, volume buttons etc so that all works and you can have your activity select the opening channel.

One of the questions in earlier threads was whether the Veon TV has discrete codes for power on and off, and input device selection. If it does, then the Harmony database doesn't know them, unfortunately. So the Hub has to keep track of the state for TV power and Input selection. For input selection it needs to remember what the list of inputs are, what the current input is, and then it is smart enough to press "Source" then up or down arrow the right number of times then "OK" to set the source. I thought this would be a real problem but so far it's been surprisingly good, almost flawless. 

Subsequently have added separate Activities for the Roku - "Watch Netflix", "Watch Vudu" and "Watch Hulu". If using Alexa, all require the "Turn on TV" command to Alexa first (see below).

If it gets itself out of sync, there are 'Fix' buttons on the app to set the power and source into alignment with the device (or the device into alignment with the hub). This would not be required if there were discreet Veon IR codes for power on, power off and each source input. If users mix using remotes and activities they will always be getting out of sync. This will be a real test. 

[edit] Regarding the above, there's a good case here to get not just the hub, but also the harmony remote. Then you could hide away the Sky and TV remotes and just leave out the Harmony remote which would work in sync with the hub and its knowledge of the device's states.

Alexa has a recently updated skill for Harmony and it considerably simplifies things. Uninstall any current Alexa Harmony skill and install the new one then tell Alexa to discover and the Harmony hyb and it's activities magically appear. This was much easier than I expected.

So now I just say "Alexa Turn on the TV" to get it started. This is important as Alexa remembers that it is in a TV controlling mode and for a period of time will interpret subsequent commands in that context. So subsequently saying "Alexa turn up the volume" will get sent to Harmony rather than Alexa itself. Alexa naturally knows how to change channel and volume for you while in the context, and if you setup friendly names on the hub Alexa discovers those so you can say "Alexa change channel to Sky Sport One" or "Alexa change channel to 51" if you wish.

One thing that is a bit confusing is the operation of "syncing" on the Harmony app. When you are making changes, it is just in the app. You need to sync these changes to the hub. And I suspect the whole shebang is stored in Harmony's cloud, not permanently on the hub or the app. So sometimes I found this didn't work or appear, but came good after a sync.

The hub must blast out a lot of IR in all directions. It's not pointing at or even in front of the TV and other equipment yet they all seem to get the signal as it is reflected around the room. That surprised me. 

[edit] The hub also comes with a separate miniblaster in a short cable so if you have some equipment in a closed cabinet and some out, you just put the miniblaster inside. The Roku is inside a closed cabinet but is controlled by wifi so I am not using the miniblaster at the moment.

One thing I have not managed to get working is control of the Mitsubushi heat pump. There doesn't seem to be any heatpump devices in the library so I got it to learn the codes for pressing the power button on the heatpump remote. However running the activity makes the heatpump beep but not switch on or off. I think the heatpump remote sends the whole setup (modes, presets, timers etc) with each press of any button and it may be too much for the learning facility. Need to find out if I can somehow learn or acquire simple on/off codes.

So that's enough for now. All in all I'm pleasantly surprised at how good this is.