Added some hue lights now everything is "broken"

Configuration
1

This is a rambling post about a load of things that suddenly seem to have broken in my HAss and general HA setup. HAss seems to be the cause but I can’t figure out what’s going on.

Last week I purchased a new Hue light for my son’s bedroom. I plugged it in and added it to Hue as “Dominic’s light”

“Alexa, turn on Dominic’s light”

“I found several devices matching that name. Please give them different names.”

What?

From this point on all my Hue lights were doing the same thing. I didn’t change anything, I just added this new light. So I started looking through the Alexa App and found that every light has a duplicate. One is “Connected Via Philips Lighting” and the other is “Connected via Royal Philips Electronics” which is as I’ve now figured out the Emulated Hue.

My initial approach to clear this up was to use the Alexa App to disable the “Royal Philips Electronics” device. Now Alexa says “This device is disabled. Please enable it in the App.”

So I re-enabled the “Royal Philips Electronics” and disabled the “Philips Lighting”. Same message.

So I dug around these forums and found one post where someone has experienced the same thing.

Home Assistant can still control the lights. However, Alexa can’t.

I didn’t change Home Assistant and I’ve added other Hue lights before without a problem. Although it seems to be Alexa’s “problem” it looks like Emulated Hue was the trigger. I’ve now run out of things to try so I thought I’d ask in here if anyone has experienced this before and knows if there’s a way to a) fix it and b) prevent it. I’m trying to avoid having to reinstall everything and factory reset everything in the vague hope that there’s something I can do which will revert everything back to a working configuration.

Thanks in advance for any pointers. My Home Assistant config is on Github if anyone wants to nose around and see what I messed up. https://github.com/stetho/home-assistant-config

Steve

2

You either need to disable the duplicates (in the Alexa app) or stop exposing the lights via emulated_hue and let Alexa speak directly to the Hue hub.

3

The problem is that Alexa sees 2 of everything due to emulated hue being enabled, I had the same problem and renaming and disabling all the emulated bulbs didn’t help.

What you need to do is disable emulated hue from your config and only enable it for specific devices you want to pass through.

To clean up the devices Alexa sees you have to log into alexa.amazon.com (not on mobile) and you’ll be able to remove all the emulated hue devices, you should be able to recognise them as they’ll be offline, it only works through the website not the app.

4

You must have a different app to me, works fine on my app to disable the duplicates.

5

I’m on android if the makes a difference, they can be disabled but alexa still complains about multiple devices, only way I’ve been able to stop it is to actually delete them which isn’t possible from the app.

6

This was the magic bit I was missing. Didn’t even think to try the website as I assumed that the app had the same functionality. That’ll teach me.

Thanks for responding. Everything is back to normal now.

Steve