I had a look at Amazon Alexa Smart Home Skill - Home Assistant
If I cannot fix the emulated hue component anytime soon, I will try the Smart Home Skill. I have enough experience to set it up so this shouldn’t be an issue.
Yet I’m still hesitant as I don’t want to expose my Home Assistant Instance to the internet. Currently I manage everything via VPN and want to keep it this way (at the moment)
I completely understand. I can say that emulated hue’s life is limited. It’s just a matter of time before amazon and Philips Hue turn off gen 1 hue bridge compatibility.
So after a couple of re-tries yesterday and a night of leaving the Echo Dot unplugged, which apparently is a soft reset, if you do it long enough (30 seconds did not help), it startet to detect all my devices again.
I did make changes to my network and did nothing special to my Home Assistant instance, except the stuff written above.
Thanks again @petro for your support!
Just for my own edification, you only have 1 gen 3 echo dot?
In total I have one Echo Dot Gen3 and two Sonos Alexa Devices.
I only unplugged the Echo Dot Gen3 over night, not the Sonos devices.
Thanks a lot for this tip. I am facing the same issue as the OP regarding emulated_hue. I was trying to add a new device, but Alexa discovery did not see this new device at all. Previously discovered devices continued to be re-discovered.
Till I read this comment, I did not realise that the Alexa Smart Home skill could be used as an alternative. All set up and working well now. Thanks!
(Just one issue: despite removing emulated_hue from the HA config, Alexa still continues to discover the previously discovered emulated_hue items)
I think I also figured out why Alexa continued to discover the old emulated_hue devices. In the “.storage” folder of Home Assistant, there was a file named “emulated_hue_ids”. This file had a list of my old devices which I had exposed via emulated_hue. I deleted this file and restarted HA. Then, Alexa stopped discovering these non-existent devices.
The one problem with using the Alexa Smart Home Skill to control HA devices from Alexa: network delay. emulated_hue used to work completely locally. But with the Alexa skill, the communication goes all the way to a Lambda function hosted on AWS and then back to the HA in my home. Between saying the command and actually seeing the lights turn on / off, there is at least a 3 second delay. And this is aggravated even more due to the limitation that the lambda function has to be hosted in EU (Ireland) despite me being located in India.
Had the same problem. Recently moved and I removed all my devices from my account with the Amazon alexa app. plugged in all my device and HA and all ports and ip’s where the same. So I scanned for device with the Alexa app serval times, nada didn’t find my emulated hue devices. I used my new alexa show 5 I had just got. scanned several times nada : (. Then I plugged in my old echo gen 2 and searched for new devices with that device (“Alexa find new devices”) and viola, it found them first try.
Also I found that I can use my Alexa Show to turn on and off the Emulated Hue devices on HA just fine as it should be. But interestingly enough is I unplug my echo dot gen2 and remove it from the network my emulated hue devices stop working from my Show and I get the (device not responding) plug the old echo dot gen 2 back in and now my emulated hue devices work again from any Alexa device (firetv, show5, dot, echo etc). Hope this helps someone
Had the same issue , ended up disabling the AsusWRT integration, after that everything went smooth.
Also Upnp integration installed
Resurrecting the issue - just tried enabling “emulated hue”.
{"input_boolean.main_rolladens":{"state":{"on":false,"reachable":true,"mode":"homeautomation"},"name":"Main Floor Rolladens","uniqueid":"00:f8:00:aa:d4:e0:46:2f-7d","manufacturername":"Home Assistant","swversion":"123","type":"On/Off light","productname":"On/Off light","modelid":"HASS321"}}
What am I missing? Does the Echo model matter at all?
Are you running on core? Also, google home and amazon require port 80 now instead of 8300.
Secondly, I highly suggest you set up Alexa Smart Home Skill. You get way more features. Emulated hue only deals with on/off devices.
I’m running on Home Assistant Yellow, 2024.3.1
here is my config.yml section
emulated_hue:
type: alexa
host_ip: 192.168.xxx.82
listen_port: 80
expose_by_default: true
exposed_domains:
- input_boolean
entities:
input_boolean.main_rolladens:
name: "Main Floor Rolladens"
hidden: false
Alexa Smart Home Skill? Is this Nabu Casa? Or is this the very detailed procedure with AWS/Lamda/etc?
Alexa Smart Home Skill requires AWS, Lamda, etc.
The functionality and outcome is identical to having a NabuCasa subscription (for alexa)
I thought the emulated_hue was instead of this?
You have 2 choices to connect devices to Alexa without paying money.
The gen 1 hue bridge only supports dimmable lights and on/off switches. Therefor emulated hue only supports dimmable lights and on/off switches. Emulated hue is 100% local, so you don’t need internet for it to work… but Alexa does not work without internet so this is a moot point. There is no speed difference between emulated hue and Alexa Smart home Skill. Both are sub 1 second reaction.
Alexa Smart Home Skill supports everything amazon supports. Same with NabuCasa. Lights, Colored Lights, Dimmable, Switches, Temperature Sensors, Binary Sensors (like doorbell notifications and washer/dryer notifications), Covers, Media Players, etc.
Maybe I should give a little more background. I have some devices on my Echo that are enabled via a skill. I can “activate” those devices via scripts and the media player. I just don’t get a feedback mechanism which is what I’m trying to do with the boolean_toggle.
If this isn’t possible just using the emulated hue, I will try Nabu Casa for a month. Do you know of devices in Alexa via a skill will be accessible to the HA in this case?
Thanks!
emulated hue will allow booleans to pass to alexa. Nothing from alexa will pass to home asssistant, if that’s what you’re asking.
Yes. When trigger the boolean toggle, I want to trigger the script that turns the device on / off in Alexa. I use a script now but want a visual display in HA.
Script works.
Okay, I have Alexa devices tied to Amazon.com and Amazon.de (Germany). I was able to discover the Boolean toggle in the US Echo but not the Germany devices.
How do I get the Echo device logged into Germany to discover this?
So, I used my Echo Show and logged into my Germany account and it was able to discover the emulated hue device I set up in HA. Interesting?!
Now that I did that, I’m trying to create a routing in Alexa that when I press the “light”, it will trigger other actions.
Problem - Alexa does not let me use the emulated hue light as a trigger. Is there a way to designate it as something else?
@petro