Emulated Hue, Physical Button?

Third party integrations
1

I am trying to add a Emulated Hue device to Home Assistant.
I am running a Raspberry Pi 3 with Home Assistant 0.41.0 installed.
I have also added the lights component (platform: hue) to make sure that it installs the phue deps.
When I enter the following commands it all is successful:
http://:8300/description.xml
http://:8300/api/pi/lights

When I do a search with the Phillips Hue app on my phone it detects the Emulated Hue device, but when I click on the Set up button the message reads " Press the push-links button on the Hue bridge you want to connect to.", and a progress line counts down, it then just returns to the search screen again.(Stuck in a loop).

The goal is to control my lights via Home Assistant by using Alexa (DIY: https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app) The Alexa part works just fine, and I have added the Philips Hue component to my Alexa Skills, but I need the Emulated Hue to be added to the meethue.com or phone app to work with Alexa and HA.

I am not sure if Philips realized this workaround their device and implemented the step where you have to physically click a button?.

2

I know that when I set up emulated hue for use with my google home you have to set the type to google home in the configuration and apparently that bypasses the ā€œpressing the buttonā€ setup. Sorry I donā€™t have the echo to test if thatā€™s the case as well. Also in order for it to work with google home it needs to be changed to port 80. Hereā€™s my config, in case it helps at all;

  type: google_home
  host_ip: 192.168.1.30
  listen_port: 80
  off_maps_to_on_domains:
3

Thanks akajester for your reply.
I have the following configuration:

type: alexa
host_ip: 10.0.0.3
listen_port: 8300

I kept it as simple as possible.

I can access the endpoints successfully at:
http://10.0.0.3:8300/description.xml
http://10.0.0.3:8300/api/pi/lights

I will try to change the port to port 80 tonight and see if that helps, but I doubt it, because on the HA Component description it states ā€œThis can be any free port on your system.ā€.

I have used the HASSbian image for my Home Assistant.

Should I run the following commands?:
sudo setcap ā€˜cap_net_bind_service=+epā€™
/srv/homeassistant/homeassistant_venv/bin/python3

4

I am still struggling with this issue when trying to connect to the Philips Hue (Emulated Hue Device).

When I open the Philips Hue app on my phone and click search it finds my Home Assistant (Emulated Hue Device and lists it, but when I click the Set up button to add the Emulated Hue Device the screen reads ā€œPress the push-links button on the Hue bridge you want to connect to.ā€, but I obviously can not do that.

Did I miss a step?

Amazon Echo (Alexa) Home Made) - Working and added Hue under ā€œYour Smart Home Skillsā€.
I am running a Raspberry Pi 3 as an Amazon Echo (https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app/wiki/Raspberry-Pi)

I am running an Raspberry Pi B with Home Assistant 0.41.0 installed and with the (Emulated Hue Device) service added:

emulated_hue:
  type: alexa
  host_ip: 10.0.0.3
  listen_port: 8300
#  advertise_ip: 10.0.0.10
#  advertise_port: 8080
#  off_maps_to_on_domains:
#    - script
#    - scene
#  expose_by_default: false
#  exposed_domains:
#    - light
#    - switch

I can access the endpoints successfully at:
http://10.0.0.3:8300/description.xml
http://10.0.0.3:8300/api/pi/lights

Has anyone managed to setup an exact or similar setup, Amazon Echo or Dot to Emulated Hue Device?

5

Iā€™m a little confused about what you are trying to do. Are you trying to control your emulated hue devices with Alexa? What are you trying to do with the Hue app? I have a dot, Echo, and Google Home and they all find my emulated devices fine. Google Home I had to run it on port 80. Alexa I just told her ā€œdiscover devicesā€ and she found them after giving me a line about pressing the button.

6

From everything Iā€™ve read here the seems to be an ongoing confusion between those that can get it to work and those that canā€™t. It actually looks to be a simple case that for those that have a physical Home or Amazon box it works fine, those that are trying to do it on the cheap with just Assistant or one of the software Alexaā€™s canā€™t.

Google have caused a lot of this by calling an app and a piece of hardware the same thing.

7

The emulated hue component emulates a Hue well enough to satisfy Echo and the Google Home, but itā€™s not compatible with the actual Hue app. Just use the Home Assistant app instead.

8

You donā€™t need to use the hue app or the alexa skill. Just press discover devices in the smarthome tab of the alexa app.

9

Is there any reason to not expose an endpoint or something we can call to ā€œpress the buttonā€?

1 Like
11

I would like that too. So I could use the smart home buttons on my Harmony Elite to control hue entities.

12

I am having a similar issue. I am trying to implement this tool: http://skyue.io/

Skyue is a Skype of Business monitoring tool that can use a Hue bulb as a status light. I want this to notify my family when I am working at home that I am on the phone and to not come in the office.

It integrates with the Hue Hub, but I have the same problem with linking it with the Emulated Hue hub. The app wants me to ā€œpush the buttonā€ on the Hue Hub. Is there anyway to simulate this? Iā€™m not sure what exactly is happening when the physical button is pressed.

13

Oh :astonished: I got it to connect. It required port 80. Itā€™s not working, but at this point I think that the application is out of date and not working with the latest Skype4Bā€¦ I donā€™t think itā€™s the Emulated Hue.