I’m running into a hilariously annoying problem and I’m starting to lose my patience (and almost my fingers) over this.
Some time ago, I had emulated_hue enabled just for testing, and I was only exposing the switch domain. The test failed miserably, so I removed emulated_hue ages ago. Or so I thought…
Turns out, Home Assistant apparently refuses to let go. Every time I let Alexa “search for new devices”, she proudly discovers exactly 295 switches (yes, only switches, because that’s all I had configured). Of course, every single one of them is “not reachable” – thanks for nothing, Alexa.
In hindsight, maybe I should’ve just exposed the cover domain instead – at least I’d only have four entities haunting me now.
And now comes the best part: Deleting them. One. By. One.
No batch delete. No select all. Just pure, honest, finger-breaking tap, tap, tap action. I’m pretty sure the Alexa app was designed by someone who hates humans.
Has anyone else faced this? Any ideas how to stop these ghost devices from haunting me?
I’d love to keep my fingers intact.
Are you sure you can not activate multi-select for deleting.
It is usually a button in the top bar and it usually look like 3 squares with a line to the right. Some of the squares might have a check mark too.
I really can’t find it – and based on my research, this option doesn’t seem to exist. Mind sharing a screenshot in case I’m missing the obvious?
Maybe I’m just blind as f***.
Also, it’s not just about deleting the devices from the Alexa app – I need to stop them from coming back in every new discovery. Otherwise, I’m just stuck in an endless finger-breaking loop.
That is a verified fact… there used to be away to access your Alexa instance via a webpage that allowed batch deleting devices, but Amazon shut it down like 3 years ago.
I double-checked by attempting to access the “/description.xml” file via my Home Assistant URL, but it simply times out, so I believe emulated Hue is disabled. Additionally, I searched my entire configuration directory for “emulated_hue” and found no results.
I also suspect that Alexa might be caching the devices. Just wanted to hear your thoughts on this and see if you have any suggestions on how to address it.
On a side note, I ended up creating an “auto-clicker script” on my Android tablet to help me delete all the orphaned devices in the Alexa app. It saved me from having to manually remove them all and risking sore fingers!