I thought the emulated_hue was instead of this?
You have 2 choices to connect devices to Alexa without paying money.
- Alexa Smart Home Skill
- Emulated hue.
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.
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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
Emulated hue emulates a 9 year old product that was discontinued 5 years ago. It’s hands down the worse path to take when interfacing with alexa. It’ll be up to you to solve the random problems it has on the alexa side.
Yeah - I guess I’ll have to get help somewhere else. Doesn’t seem to be with you.
Sorry, I don’t use emulated hue anymore because it was too limited. I already explained that you should use Alexa Smart Home Skill because it’s up-to-date and it’s the best way to create usable devices in Alexa.
You’re welcome to use Emulated Hue, but the devices are limited to what a Hue Bridge 1 can do. And that may be a limitation on the actions you can do in Alexa.
I already spelled all this out and you decided to continue down the emulated hue path anyway. So there’s no reason to be upset with me.
one easy way to trigger a routine is to use Alexa media custom command and use home assistant to “speak” a specific phrase that you have set as a voice trigger.
When I look at the Alexa Smart Skill, one of the first things it says is:
The Emulated Hue integration provides a simpler alternative to use utterances such as “Alexa, turn on the kitchen light” .
That’s what I was trying to do.
Does the Amazon Smart Skill expose all the devices or do I have to create a separate “function” for each device or skill I want to control? A single time or must this be repeated?
Thanks that’s what I’m currently doing. I was looking to add an indicator/status of the device I’m controlling.
For example, I have shutters that have an Alexa skill. I can open them or close them no problem. I have an automation that closes a shutter due to heat, but later another automation that closes the same shutter at a specific time. If the “heat” automation triggers, there is no need for the “time” automation to trigger.
Additionally, I’d like a visual/Lovelace button that shows the status of the shutter. Some like this:
sorry, I don’t know if a simple way to do this short of a very ugly hack whereby you create routines in Alexa that flip the state of your emulated hue entities
No problem.
Both emulated hue and alexa smarthome skill allow turn on/turn off utterances without any configuration in alexa.
If you’re attempting to pass the state of a device in alexa (your shutter) to HA (an input_boolean), you have to use routines.
In your case, emulated hue should work if you expose an input_boolean via emulated hue to alexa.
You’d make a routine. In the When event on alexa, you’d select your non-home assistant device (your shutter) via the Smart Home section, then you’d choose the appropriate state. Assuming it’s an open/close device, you’d choose Open and click next. Then you’d add an Action, again you choose Smart Home. This time, you need to find the input_boolean. This will most likely be in lights or switches. Once you find it, select it and choose On, then next, then save. This will sync up your non-homeassistant device to the homeassistant input boolean. Repeat the process to sync up the off state using Close and Off respectively.
If you can’t do that with emulated hue (Only applies to the action section), then you need to switch to Alexa Smart Home Skill. If you’re having issues with the When event section, that is not a problem with emulated hue or home assistant. That’s an issue with whatever is creating the device in Alexa. Based on your comments, my understanding is that you’re having issues with the When event section with your shutter. I.e. you’d need to look into why you can’t use the shutter with the when event.
I’ve discovered a couple of things.
1st - I have an Amazon Echo which for some reason does not support the Hue. I’ve confirmed this by adding an Echo Show and it immediately discovers the Emulated Hue device. When I remove it from the account and go back to just using my Amazon Echo Speaker, the device disappears.
2nd - When configuring a routine on Alexa - non of my smart devices show up as a “when.” Not sure why this is but it’s certainly a problem. I’m going to have to try and solve this on the Alexa side.
Thank you @petro for your previous response.
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that is curious. I have echo dots devices of mulitple generations and they work for me.
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right. something I noticed is that it when I toggle the entity on the ha side it takes a little bit for Alexa to see it. so my hypothesis is that it’s working via polling and polling change events aren’t being shown in routine "when"s… just a theory.
as I said above, if you want a routine to be triggered from a ha entity, either go to developer mode or trigger it from ha and use that to invoke the Alexa routine directly
Yes, very strange. I’ve tried from my iPad and my iPhone thinking it might be the app but the results are the same. Both were logged into my Amazon.de account.
When I use the app logged into my Amazon.com account, you can see the difference.
There are devices in each account.
German account:
US account
Alexa Smart Home Skill, Emulated Hue, and Nabucasa are all push, not polling. If you expose entities that are created by a polling integration, then it will appear as if alexa is polling them, when in actuality home assistant is polling through the integration.