Control TP-Link Smart Plug with Harmony Hub via Emulated Hue Bridge

One of my first smart devices was a TP-Link Wi-fi Smart Plug (model HS100). I used it to control the lights in our Christmas tree by voice control using an Amazon Echo. It worked great then, and after Christmas I moved it to our family room to control a floor lamp that we usually turn on in the evenings while watching TV or reading stories to our daughter. Unfortunately it is not compatible with Logitech’s Harmony Hub, so I wasn’t able to control it with my Harmony app/remote.

This is where Home Assistant proved how good it is at bridging the gaps between smart home devices. Adding it was easy enough. I assigned it a static IP address–all of my Home Assistant-related devices have a static IP address set–and followed the documentation to add it to my configuration.yaml file:

switch:
  - platform: tplink
    host: 192.168.0.150

After checking the configuration and restarting Home Assistant it showed up as a switch in the web UI. It even used the name I had assigned the plug in the TP-Link Kasa app. I went on to customize it using the customize section of the configuration.yaml file by changing the icon, capitalizing the friendly_name, and enabling control of it with the Emulated Hue Bridge component.

homeassistant:
  # Name of the location where Home Assistant is running
  name: Home
  # ... some code omitted for brevity
  customize:
    # ... some code omitted for brevity
    switch.lamp:
      friendly_name: Lamp
      icon: mdi:lamp
      emulated_hue: true

After another restart of Home Assistant, my Logitech Harmony Hub picked up the “Lamp” as a Philips Hue bulb, getting around the incompatibility issue. Now I’m able to assign one of the smart home buttons on my Harmony remote to turn the lamp on/off. That was one of my initial complaints in the first post in this series, and it really does add convenience when watching a movie at night.

Another bonus (in my mind) is that to use Alexa for voice control of the plug, now I can disable the “Remote Control” feature in the TP-Link Kasa app–bypassing TP-Link’s cloud service–and instead have Alexa see it as a Hue bulb and control it locally within my network.