Getting started with "Emulated Hue" to send a boolean value aka virtual switch to Alexa [solved]

Configuration
1

Hello there,

I try to get “Emulated Hue bridge” up and running to talk to Alexa. I have set expose_by_default to true, to see all what is available. If I visit the url http://192.168.0.xxx/api/v2/lights I get a response, but the contents are the empty brackets {}. Does this mean something went wrong or simply that there are no devices that could be exported by the Emulated Hue bridge?

What I actually like to do is to create a virtual switch, so that I can switch the boolean value by an automation within home assistant. Unfortunately I did not find documentation how to do this und doe to the lack of experience with Philips Hue at all I am not able to create my own solution so far.

Any help how to expose a virtual switch be means of Emulated Hue?

2

How did you set up the integration?
This is my working configuration:


emulated_hue:
  host_ip: 192.168.xxx.xx
  listen_port: 80
  expose_by_default: false
  exposed_domains:
    - binary_sensor
    - input_boolean
    - switch

  entities:
    binary_sensor.loggiatuer:
      hidden: false

    input_boolean.abendessen:
      hidden: false

and so on
3

@pedolsky

I started with the most simple configuration, like shown in the documentation. That is expose_by_default: true.

After a night of sleep I was able to find the solution. input_boolean is the right hint by the way for my goal. My issue was, that they give no explanation of domain in the documentation of Emulated Hue.

Thank you

4

See here for a complete list of domains

5

Solved. Partly.

The empty brackets {} in fact resulted of having nothing to show. I finally solved this by creating a helper entity under Settings in the admin tool. The type in the GUI is toggle. It creates an entity of type input_boolean in the data model. Type in turn is called domain in Emulated Hue. A whole mess of names for the same entity what makes it really hard to get started.

After I created this toggle it showed immediately up under http://192.168.0.xxx/api/v2/lights filling the empty brackets. Alexa did find it without issues and I am able to turn it on and off by speech command.

Yeah, a two way connection between HA and Alexa without the need of the cloud. I am surprised that there is so few knowledge in the community of this simple solution for such a widespread device as Alexa. Should be more advertised.

While turning devices on and off by Alexa is quite useful, there still is a limit. Alexa doesn’t offer the change of lights as triggers for routines. I also tried this with a virtual switch created from a template. It also eposes as a light within Alexa. I suspect that Emulated Hue only offers the option to pull and set information and not to push upon changes on side of HA, though I don’t find this documented.

6

@pedolsky Thank you.

Yes I was referring to this documentation, the only one I did find. No README on Github. This is the default list of domains. It doesn’t tell it is the full list of all possible domains. There still may be more options.

I tried to expose button_press, input_number. This basically is possible. Both are exposed as lights that are always on. So there is no use in this.