@lmamakos I’m pretty sure your statement about Ring is untrue. Without the monthly fee you don’t get cloud services but it doesn’t render the doorbell or camera useless. Besides, Ring has a lot more expenses with bandwidth and storing your videos for 6 months. Not to mention technical support etc. So if you can get all that for $3 a month, $5 with very low per user costs, is a bit excessive. Considering technical support is basically community based, it’s a lot of money in the pocket of the devs and nothing for the people contributing in other ways.
Again, I don’t mind paying something, but there has to be a one time up front fee for the life of the project as on option. That or consider a much lower monthly cost or yearly subscription of $10 kind of thing. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.
$60/yr is a conscious purchasing decision for most people, $10 is a yeh why not it’s for a good cause amount and am fairly sure they’d get a lot more than 6 times the number of subscribers if they did that as well as a lot of good feeling, rather than all the negative this will cause as users will feel they have a right to whinge if they’re paying for it and killing the community spirit.
Also not clever dangling the carrot in the two main posts launching this but it’s not till you get to the third that a cost is mentioned.
@masterkenobi - take a look here: Haaska help please?
I got very close; and would be happy to help you get to thge same stage - perhaps we can work together to get over the final hurdle…
anyway, i just tried the HA cloud. It was amazingly easy. every devices in my HA is discovered just like that (except climate devices). The discovered devices also works well with Alexa-enabled smart home group in Alexa app. Unlike emulated Hue, my TVs are identified as TV, not as light anymore. That means, if I created an Alexa-enabled group and add my devices as follows…
Group name: Living Room (linked to Echo in Living Room)
Device names:
Living room lights (device type: light)
Living room TV (device type: TV)
I can now tell my Echo in living room to turn on the TV by simply saying “Alexa, turn on TV” instead of “Living Room TV”.
If I do the same for my other Echos in other rooms, for example in my bedroom, I can turn on the bedroom TV using the same command too; “Alexa, turn on TV”.
Unfortunately, it only works for TV and lights. It doesn’t work on fans, speaker and air conditional yet.
@masterkenobi I agree, it does work very well with little setup. Can’t get my head around $5 a month for turning on a handful of devices. I’ll be looking at other solutions. Really sucks because I was hopeful on finally getting a real Alexa implementation with this until the price bomb got dropped on us!
Have you been able to get a cover to work? It discovers my garage fine. I set it as type door and that shows up but Alexa says garage doesn’t support that when I say open the the garage. And she says garage Isint responding if I say turn on garage (emulated hue works perfect with turn on garage)
It doesn’t work for me too. I exclude every domains and use alexa_hidden: false in customize section to expose those entities I want but it doesn’t work.
Well I will stick with Hue emulator until exclusions work. seems cool but not ready for Prime time and specially if the want $5 a month every darn thing should work like a champ!!!
@masterkenobi@subnetangel
So here’s what I found with exclusions. It does work but the issue is if you have added it and then try to delete the device from the Alexa app, it doesn’t actually delete them. Log into it from a web browser at Alexa.amazon.com and “forget” the device. Then it will be truly gone and on next discover devices it won’t find anything you’ve excluded in HA. Basically the issue is more with the Alexa app.
Yep, they’ve managed to create the same stupid situation as Harmony have with there web and app versions of set up. You can’t do everything in just one and often need both open in front of you to complete something that should be simple.
