Fan entity and Echo

Configuration Z-Wave
1

I decided to upgrade from 0.46.1 to 0.48.1 this weekend and had a weird issue I wanted to share. I went through the changeover from the old zwave entity ids to the new, updated my config, and set new_entity_ids = true. All of that went great.

I use the emulated hue component with my Echo so I had her forget all devices and relearn everything. That went great except my fans were missing. I have some GE fan control switches that were seen just fine by HomeAssistant but the emulated hue wasn’t exporting them. I did the debugging step of checking ‘http://XXXXX:8300/api/pi/lights’ and sure enough the fans were not being exported. My emulated hue component setup had the ‘fan’ domain listed under exposed_domains.

It wasn’t until I added an empty fan entity to my configuration.yaml that things started working right. I didn’t find that in the release notes or any of the documentation, I simply made an educated guess. So is that expected behavior and/or does the documentation need updating ?

2

can you show what you added in your configuration.yaml??

3

It was literally just this

fan:
4

Strange, I don’t have that anywhere.
do you have a separate customization.yaml file?

I don’t expose anything by default in my emulated_hue section. I set them up in my customization.yaml file.

5

My emulated hue is just this:

emulated_hue: type: alexa host_ip: x.x.x.x listen_port: 8300 exposed_domains: - switch - light - group - scene - fan

I do have a customization.yaml but it is nothing special, just setting names for things.

6

My emulated hue in configuration.yaml:

emulated_hue:
  type: alexa
  host_ip: www.xxx.yyy.zzz
  expose_by_default: false

Customization.yaml is like this:

light.office_lights_level:
  emulated_hue: true
  emulated_hue_name: "office lights"
  friendly_name: "office lights"
fan.office_fan_level:
  emulated_hue: true
  emulated_hue_name: "office fan"
  friendly_name: "office fan"
switch.kitchen_overhead_switch:
  emulated_hue: true
  emulated_hue_name: "kitchen overhead light"
  friendly_name: "kitchen overhead light"

I did it this way because I had so many devices (lights, fans, switches) showing up in alexa that it was having problems. I wanted some of my switches and things exposed by alexa, but not all of them. It was easier for me to select them and then I could name them whatever I wanted in here.

But back to the original problem, I have no idea why you had to specify “fan” in your configuration.yaml. That’s just strange.

1 Like