Peter,
I have a Lutron remote light dimmer - I never could figure out how to incorporate a dim command with a sequence like "Watch DVD" It always did something weird even though I was telling it to leave other devices on, it would turn one or the other off inexplicably. Am I missing something obvious?.....Rob
I don't have any fancy-pants (
) dimmers in my system, nor do I have the Harmony software in front of me and it's been at least 6/8 months since I last tinkered with it. So bear with me....
When you switch between activities, by default, the Harmony software will have coded the remote to power-down the un-needed components in your system. This could certainly have undesired consequences with your dimmers if the remote doesn't understand when it needs to (or to-not) trigger them.
You can override this behavior and modify the start/stop commands for each activity. I want to say that you go to the Activities setup and there's a "customize" feature in there, where you can change which commands are sent. I know that I do this on a few of my activities when I wanted to tinker with sound modes and what-not.
So long as the dimmers are IR-controlable, you should be able to teach the remote the proper commands. Then you'd need to tweak each activity with respect to what each should do with the dimmers. It could be a bit tricky to do, but I'd be surprised if there isn't a way to do it.
Do first make sure that the remote can actually control the dimmers. I don't know if your dimmers respond to simple more|less brightness commands, or if you send it a value, or whatever. But before trying to put the automatic dim/bright commands in activity startup/shutdown routines, just put the brightness commands in soft button(s) in some activity to see if you can manually control the dimmers. Once you know that works, and you can reliably dim|brighten them manually, then you can tinker with adding those same commands to various activity changes.
But one word of advice, even if the Lutron dimmers are listed in Logitech's database, I would try overriding them by re-teaching the software with whatever IR remotes actually came with your dimmers. I say that because with my AVR, even though the model was listed in Logitech's database, a couple of the obscure commands didn't work correctly, and so I had to override them from the original remote. After that, no problems.
Good luck. I'm sure someone else with dimmers + Harmony (there must be someone here...) can chime in with better advice. If I remember, I'll try to poke around with the software this weekend and see if I can find anything else in there that might help you with your dimmers.
