Yesterday I went to work and Alexa to emulated_hue integration was working perfectly as it had for years. When I came home it was broken. Alexa would respond to nothing and couldn’t find anything. I’m still running in the 0.92.1 range so I updated. That did not fix the integration problem.
Then I added the listen_port:80 which I saw in the configs. That “fixed” Alexa integration however it would then tell me things were out of range or malfunctioning when in fact they were working.
I saw then from the forums that this was an issue.
So then I # out everything to do with emulated_hue in configuration.yaml and set up HA Cloud.
Cloud works ALMOST perfectly except I can no longer control my fan speeds (and probably other related sliders). When I tell Alexa to set the bedroom fan intensity to medium or 66 (both worked before with hue) it says the fan isn’t responding.
So ideally I’d like hue to work again because it was FREE and I don’t want to control my HA from Alexa from the net. I can VPN in and control things just fine .
Can anyone shed any light on this? I’ve seen most all of the related threads I think, but nothing is working for me.
Emulated hue broke because of alexa, not home assistant. If you are on hassio, you are SOL and you need to move to Cloud or Alexa Smart Home Skill using an amazon developer skill in combo with an lambda function (free). Both have the exact same functionality, but the calls are not local like emulated hue.
Both Cloud and Alexa Smart Home Skill treat fans as unknown devices. Emulated hue treated everything as a dimmable light. So, to get the functionality back in your fans, make a template light for your fan and expose that to Cloud/ASHS.
I’ll warn you. Alexa Smart Home Skill will require patience to setup. It’s not easy. As long as you follow the directions line by line, you shouldn’t have issues. Also make sure you read EVERYTHING in the docs. Overlooking 1 detail could cause the setup to fail at the last step.
I personally had no issues, but I set it up years ago as a test back in the day. When I reset it up last week after emulated hue broke, it was much easier (if you could imagine). But I had the ‘hard’ setup in my memory so it was easy to follow. If that makes sense.
I already did the cloud and the cost isn’t a deal breaker for me. But I will try to set up the Smart Home Skill. I just perused the setup and it doesn’t look like something I can’t do. I’ll do it to save $60 a year.
I’m guessing hue broke from an Echo firmware upgrade or something? Literally worked as I left the house and wasn’t working when I came home. Firmware push is all I can think of.
That’s the general consensus at the moment. If you have an echo with the old firmware on your network, alexa will work. As soon as all echos have the current firmware, nothing will work.
The only way to get discovery to work is to remove all references to old devices by deleting them from the browser. Then, open port 80 for emulated hue. Note that this is not possible on HASSIO because it requires a command line change to allow the HA user access to port 80. So you can only do this on hassbian. I’m sure there is a command to do this on hassio if you have access to the docker containers (I.E. still not possible on hassio if you are using HassOS), but no-one has attempted it and I don’t know docker well enough to try.
Once you are on port 80, rediscover the devices and you should be good to go. The complaining that you were seeing on port 80 is probably due to the fact that you didn’t remove the old devices via the browser. I’ve also noticed that deleting the items via the browser doesn’t always work. I’m sure there is a way to remove these devices from alexa cache but I haven’t put the effort into figuring out how.
I saw other posts here on the forum where it said to remove devices and add them again from the app or web page. I did that and re-added them and it worked once or twice and then went back to the bad behavior.
Everything but setting the fan speed verbally seems to be working with Cloud and I’ll try the template thing later to resolve that.
I hope they fix the hue though. That was simple, and totally internal. I don’t care about external access as I run a VPN on a firewall and I can just VPN back into my network from anywhere to do what I need to do. Hue was simple.
All I did was comment out the hue lines in configuration.yaml. I’m ready to hop back in when or rather if they fix it. Thanks again for all the info. Much appreciated.
any word on how to fix this? I’m running HA out of a virtual machine so I have full access to everything. I tried going to the cloud, but there is some type of connectivity timeout that makes me re-sync the cloud with alexa every hour or so or alexa starts saying that the devices aren’t responding. I would really like to go back to the hue emulator. That worked well and removed one point of failure from the process.