Silently switch to activity based on two-way communication

Activities are great but using HDMI-CEC I can do things like put in a BluRay while watching Tivo and it switches everything and starts playing the disk without me touching a remote control. I would be really nice if Simple Remote could see the input change on my receiver and silently change to the activity tied to that input. I know Simple Control is polling my receiver every couple of seconds so it knows the input change has happened. I’ve been playing with doing this myself but at the point I’m writing software there are better platforms.

This could be extended in so many ways. If I hit Now Playing on my Tivo peanut remote Simple Control could show a now playing screen. I want a world where every action I take, no matter the device it’s taken on, is reflected everywhere.

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I totally agree on this one

So I could do this myself, to a degree, if there was a REST call that would get the current activity. I know that Simple Hub is pushing synchronization events and I can poll my receiver to see what input it’s on. If I could tap into the sync event (I looked at the traffic using wireshark but didn’t see anything useful) I could then compare that to my receiver input and change the activity to match my receiver.

@jheavner106044 - Love this idea. Would really like to be able to query for the active activity. This would prevent the Simple team from having to build too much and I could certainly program my ISY on the other end to query this and manage some states. Cool idea!

Something we’ve been intending to do for a while. It’s a natural extension of the Triggers feature we already have. Just requires adding the top receivers to the list of allowed trigger devices. To make it nice, we’d have to tie it into the Edit Activity UI rather than just the Triggers UI.

Anyway, it’s a good idea. We’re deep in 5.0 which is unquestionably the largest release we’ve done, so we can take a look at small things like this when the patient emerges from the operating room.

Thank you.

Hi, I’m coming back to this request again. Would it be possible to update the REST API to return the current activity?

Chiming in here to also request “current activity” status be added to the REST API. Would be incredibly valuable for enhanced integration scenarios.

Thanks for continuing to iterate on this wonderful product!