Using Tasker+Harmony to prevent soundbar timeout?

by wbarnes4393

I have a Nvidia Shield Android TV box, with a Harmony Hub, and also a Polk Signa S1 soundbar. I have a Harmony activity set up to turn all these things on. If I just watch continuously, everything is fine. However, the soundbar has an auto shutoff "feature", so that if I pause a show and walk away, after a certain amount of time, the soundbar powers off. The soundbar doesn't appear to have any setting to disable the auto shutoff feature.

I was thinking about whether I could install tasker on my Shield, or IFTTT, and make it to where tasker knows if I've paused a show, that it send a quick mute and unmute command to the soundbar after, say, every 5 minutes it's paused. This way, presumably, the soundbar would never shutoff until I manually turned it off.

I have never used tasker, so I don't know if this is even possible (especially for it to know when a show is paused). Does anyone know if something like this is possible, or have some other solution I am overlooking?

NoShftShck16

Tasker, as far as I know, cannot be installed on the Shield. I'm not familiar enough with Harmony to know if this is possible or not :-/

jdox_

I doubt the mute signal will be enough if the soundbar autoshutoff is caused by a lack of data playing through the speakers.

You might have to get tasker to play a tiny mp3 soundchunk crafted to be imperceptible to humans every 5 mins when it detects a pause (or just always). But I believe those keypresses are detectable.

notarebel

Ha, I have the exact same problem!

The solution I slapped together is a screensaver for Kodi/SPMC which kicks in at 19 minutes and triggers the off command on the harmony (prevents the harmony and the amp from being desynced, and saves electricity if the wife or kids leave the TV on then run off), though it could just as easily make a beep or toggle mute on the amp to prevent the auto shutoff from kicking in.

I only implemented that last week to see if the idea could work. I'm planning on making it an Android TV screensaver so that it can work for Netflix and other apps when I get time.

Unfortunately it's not very portable. I'm using a harmony API server to expose a simple HTTP API for the harmony, and then a very simple python script (which acts as a screensaver) that uses that API to trigger the off command. But maybe the same kind of approach could work for you?