Emulated Hue + Alexa issues

Configuration
22

@snarby and I can’t either because I have Ecobee and that works even better than Nest. just kidding! :wink:

2 Likes
23

I’m using an Echo2 in combination with HASSIO and Emulated Hue and I’m finally able to discover my devices with the Alexa app. At first Alexa didn’t discover anything untill I added “listen_port: 80” and “expose_by_default: false” to my configuration.

My configuration sample:

emulated_hue:
host_ip: <HASSIO ip>
listen_port: 80
expose_by_default: false

With this configuration no HASSIO devices will be exposed by Emulated HUE by default. So don’t forget to add “emulated_hue_hidden: false” in your customize.yaml to the devices you want to expose with emulated hue.

light.eettafel_level:
friendly_name: Eettafel
custom_ui_state_card: state-card-custom-ui
state_card_mode: break-slider
stretch_slider: true
emulated_hue_hidden: false
hide_control: false
slider_theme:
pin: true

1 Like
24

I’ve got the same problem right now.

Yesterday some of my devices, that have allready been discovered by the Echo stopped working, with the answer that the devices are not responding, should check the network connection blabla.

I didn’t changed anything in my configuration! I dropped all discovered devices now, and the Echo was only able to detect my hue bulbs and my Sonos speakers.

My config looks like this:

emulated_hue:
#  type: alexa
  host_ip: 192.168.20.20
  listen_port: 80
#  expose_by_default: false
  exposed_domains:
    - light
    - switch
    - climate
    - cover

and if I check the API url after HASSIO has started, it shows all the devices that should be exposed including, switches, covers etc.

No idea, why discovering of those devices stopped working.

edit: I tried to remove some of the exposed domains and tried to discover devices without the “climate” group exposed to the bridge.

Now the devices have been detected and can be switched using alexa.

Is it really a problem having more than 50 devices? Any hints to handle that behavour, except exposing only selected devices?

25

The limit on gen1 Phillips hue is 63 devices, so naturally alexa will ignore more than that when using emulated hue.

I am very selective what I send through so I don’t reach the max.

EDIT: Also make sure you don’t have duplicate friendly names across all your exposed domains. Don’t use special characters in the names. Make sure your names aren’t longer than ~25 characters. These things will will also cause problems. We are emulating phillips hue, so we are limited to what phillips hue gen 1 could do.

26

Could not find better thread for this so I will loan this thread.

Is it possible to change the device type in emulated hue? I mean that now alexa sees all the things as lights so when I say “Alexa, turn off all the lights” emulated hue instances will also turn off like my computer (it is exposed as switch to Alexa). It would be cool if I could change the type to switch or “other” or something like that.

There is possibility in Alexa Android app to change the device type but only if the manufacturer supports this and emulated hue instances are greyed out on device type.

27

Nope, original hue’s only had lights, so that’s all you get.

I recommend making groups for lighting. So instead of saying ‘alexa turn off all lights’ say something like ‘alexa turn off inside lights’ and make a group called inside lights.

Yes because hue doesn’t support anything but lights. Newer hue bridges might, but emulated hue emulates a v1 bridge (lights only). And before you ask, it’s not possible to emulate later bridges because of the security hue added.

1 Like