Since later model Amazon Echo devices have built-in sensors like temperature & motion detection, I’m wondering if Home Assistant has any way to treat Echo as an HA device with entities, to leverage those sensors in HA automations?
I’m not seeing any HACS integrations along that line.
Would it be possible to create a button or sensor as a helper or something in HA, then expose it to Alexa cloud service, & have Alexa update it, & HA respond to those changes?
Or am I mish-mashng things together, &/or just asking for a capability that doesn’t exist?
For this, you need to install the “Alexa Media Player” from HACS.
By default, it will only set up a Media Player component and provide some of the controll options.
Unfortunately, I don’t really recall what I’ve done to expose the temperature Sensor as well… that’s maybe given in the Documentation.
Unfortunately, other sensors are not provided as of now (at least, no motion detection, etc.)
Hmm, that sounds promising. I was about to set up Alexa Media Player anyway, for multi-room audio. So I’ll keep an eye out for enabling of sensors when I do that, now that I know it’s possible. Thanks!
as a late entry for this one, I purchased a Gen 5 Dot (as it was only £21 on offer on my account)…and only really bought it as I know it has the temp sensor embedded.
Installed the device and all the usual stuff showed but the temp sensor did not and there didn’t seem to be any way to expose it…however, restarting HASS seemed to pull it through… in fairness, restarting the HACs integration would probably have done the same job but I didn’t think to try that until I am typing this out.
Go to “Settings >> Devices & Services”. On the Alexa Media Player card, click on “Configure” and check “Include devices connected via Echo”. Finally click on “Submit”
This brought the temp sensor for me with Echo Dot 5th Generation
add to @LuisMunozVillarreal Information, you must set correctly the domain where your devices was added.
In my case I added amazon.com without looking at the configuration options, and for that reason the temperature sensor did not appear.
in the logs (home-assistant.log file) I got this message:
“2023-08-12 17:23:57.880 WARNING (MainThread) [alexapy.alexalogin] Domain amazon . com does not match reported account domain ; functionality is not likely to work, please fix”
delete the config and create again with correct domain (in my case amazon.es ) , magic! suddenly showed the temperature sensor.
I’ve done that, nothing appeared.
I’ve restarted HA, but still nothing.
To be fair: the sensors and configs shown on the screen shot abowe are also missing.
I just have mediaplayer…
Hmm, I like that idea. I’ve already got an Alexa routine controlling a light device in HA; why not also a virtual one --like maybe a toggle type Helper entity, which is exposed to Alexa.
It’s necessary to create an Alexa routine for every movement/not movement detection of the respective devices which can then switch the helper switches made available on Alexa.
The helper switches status can then be used further on in HA.
A nice workaround actually. I’m just currently trying to find out how reliably the detection works, cause somehow my 2 Echos and the 2 Echo Shows seem to pause the detection for a certain time after every detection and will not “redetect” if you haven’t left the devices alone for a certain time.
Well, I now have 8 Alexa routines set up (2 for every device, one for detection one for no detection) to switch the HA helper switches and will monitor the results for a while.
EDIT:
Okay, it absolutely works with that little Workaround:
I created this little overview to monitor how the Alexa sensors do the Job.
(I also got a tapo security camera without HA integration that I implemented the same way)
The Echos seem to have a ~15-30min timeframe from switching from “detection” to “no detection” , whereas the Echo Shows with Camera detection switch back quicker(~15min) than the Echos with ultrasound detection(~30min).
But thats just very rough data I collected within a 12h timeframe and over night. Staying in the room will make the Echos stay on “detection”.
Summed up, it works and I can actually utilise the Sensors now.
Hope I could provide some useful input for you guys
how did you manage to expose helpers or virtual switches to alexa? Where do you host them? In HA it would be a boolean switch as a helper.
How do you create a routine with no motion detected? I dont think there is a native alexa trigger for this?
