I don’t have Hue Emulator set up on HA, but I do on 12 D1 Minis (ESP8266s) set up with Hue Emulator.
Historically Alexa/Echo devices have been able to find my devices correctly. The advantage is that Alexa communicates with these devices directly. If my HA server is down for whatever reason I can continue to control them via voice with Alexa.
Yesterday while re configuring one of my D1 Minis I did something wrong and killed the D1 Mini. Had other laying around, flashed it with tasmota, installed the saved config file I had, and supposedly was up and running. Via HA it is working fine.
However it messed up my Alexa discovery. I can’t properly recognize/add devices that are set up with hue emulator. Did all kinds of trouble shooting, even deleting all devices that had already been configured and continued to work properly.
One issue was that even though I would set all emulators off on the D1 Minis via tasmota configuration, Alexa keep discovering the devices. At one point I set one up as a Bilkins WeMo emulator, and to my surprise not only did it pick it up, it actually picked up both entities/relays. In the past Wemo emulator would only pickup ONE.
Today I spent over an hour with Amazon trying to trouble shoot, but they weren’t much help. I detached all echo devices from my account, then deleted them from Alexa app. To double make sure I even unplugged all echos from the wall. I then configured one Echo, and got some results.
With Amazon tech support on the line I created a new amazon account, then pulled an Echo device to that new account. Then made sure only one D1 Mini/Tasmota had the emulator turned on to Hue emulator (the rest were set to none). I tried discovering new devices and got the same bad result.
Same bad result is that it supposedly only finds “one” device but there should be more. But when I delete one the other pops up. Hard to put in words, but right now I am running a test tasmota, set up with 2 relays. Friendly names are Relay1 and Relay2. When Alexa finds the devices it will say “I found one new device Relay 1”, but on the device list in the app it might show as Relay1 or Relay2. Then on the device list (Lets say it says Relay1) when I click on it, the new screen reads “Rleay2”, from that screen I can delete the device. When I delete the device it takes me back to the device list, and “Relay1” shows up again. When I click on it this time I do get “relay1” on top of the screen and I delete it again. Some of my devices have up to 4 relays set up, so I end up having to delete the device 4 times.
Since I had the same problem on a totally new setup, I had assumed the issue was with the tasmota hue emulator. Then after a cold beer figured my whole issue started when I replaced the one D1 Mini yesterday. I decided to open the switch box and pull the 5v wire from the D1 mini, basically turning it off.
At this point ALL my D1 Minis were set up as Belkin Wemo Emulator, but to test it out I logged into one of them and switched it to Hue Emulator. Then I asked Alexa to find new devices (this is on my real Amazon account). To my surprise not only did Alexa find the device I had setup as Hue Emulator correctly it actually found 24 devices, which were the Hue Philips lights I had deleted.
At this point I thought I was on the clear, and that what was giving me problems was the tasmota I replaced yesterday that was now turned off. In my Alexa app I now had my devices listed twice, once as plugs (wemos) and once as lightbulbs (philips). At this point I decided to delete all my devices again (both plugs and lights), then go into all my D1 Minis and set them up as Hue Emulator (they were all set to Wemos except one). Well when i did a search for new devices my issue popped up again. It only found “8” devices when it should have found 20.
Not sure how the actually Hue protocol works, but seems the information is being stored somewhere. I deleted “smart home device hisotry” from alexa and amazon page, but that didn’t do the trick.
Any ideas on how to clear Hue info from my network?