Google Home and Emulated Hue issues

Configuration
1

Hi all,
Trying to get the emulated hue working with Google assistant (Google home) and having issues at the stage of actually doing the pairing.

When I select Hue from the add devices screen it’s trying to connect to a Philips Hue account and then says no devices found.

I have checked that I can see the appropriate output when I go to http://hassip/devices.xml and http://hassip/api/username/lights. So I know the Emulated Hue is running but the Google home configuration piece isn’t picking it up.

Does anyone have any info on what I’m doing wrong or how I can get it working?

Thanks!

2

If you can access those links it should be working, you are on port 80 correct?

When I link my hue, I press the button on the actual hue device I have, but my emulated hue items also show up when pairing is done.

However, I did once use the emulated hue without clicking the physical hue button, I just clicked pair and waited without pressing any button… then the emulated devices only showed up.

3

try this from the bottom of the emulated hue home assistant page:

sudo setcap ‘cap_net_bind_service=+ep’ /srv/homeassistant/homeassistant_venv/bin/python3

4

Unfortunately I had already done this and didn’t notice any difference.

To be clear, I don’t need a physical Philips Hue Bridge do I? I thought the reason for the emulated hue component to was act as a software bridge.

5

@wjbeckett you don’t need a Philips Hue, the Emulated Hue will present as one. You could also look at HA-Bridge.

FYI - I had the exact same issue trying to use Emulated Hue on a Windows PC, I switched to Linux and it worked fine from then onwards. What environment are you running HASS on?

6

Thanks for the clarification.

My HASS environment is running in a Linux VM on a Windows Server.

7

@michael.muir I have also tried HABridge but get the same thing.

I try to set up some devices as hue lights in the Google home app, it tries to link to a hue account then says it can’t find my bridge.

Weird.

8

Seems Google has changed the setup part. A work around here: Google Home Hue Setup Change?

9

@Danielhiversen thanks for the reply mate.
Looks like that apk doesn’t work with the recent Google assistant home control. That must be baked in to assistant itself because it still wants to link to a hue account when accessing the home control settings through Google assistant.

That’s a shame.
:cry:

10

I finally sit down to setup my Google Home and HA using Hue emulation and find this out. I just can’t win. ARRGHH… So is there a work around for this? Purchase a HUE get an account/activate it them copy the settings to the Hue Emulation in HA? Really don’t want to have a Google Home and Alexa/Echo…

11

I have a Philips hue gen 1 hub lying around which I have no use. I tried with that one along with the emulated_hue, only the physical one is discovered and paired :frowning: looks like its expecting the physical press.

I don’t know May be if someone with decent programming skill can simulate a press might solve the issue? I read in some other forum, users were able to do the same with some Java based hue and virtual switch. Though ifttt with Google Assistant works fairly but this would be more flexible way to do stuff.

12

Can you share the link to the forum that figured out the button press with the virtual switch? Seems like a long shot that it’s as simple as that but, worth a try!

13

Honestly, I have my emulated hue connected right now but it constantly messes up things with my actual hue hub. The google home is constantly forgetting group assignments and not seeing some of the emulated hue entities randomly at times.

I would love to not be dependent on IFTTT, but it works pretty well, I think I am just going to transition everything over to IFTTT and disconnect the emulated hue… It hasn’t worked too well ever since I set it up to be honest… It seems like every since day I come home and it says the bedroom lights have not been defined and I have to re add the group… IDK, it just doesn’t seem to be very “smart” :wink:

Of course maybe this will still happen after I disconnect the emulated hue, but as I recall it never happened before I set it up, we’ll see.

14

Are you guys sure your Emulated hue is running correctly? It’s running on port 80, etc? I keep unpairing Phillips hue in Google Home app and have yet to see this update where it forces a hue login. I DO get a login request if there is no Emulated hue (or HA-Bridge is another “hue faker” I play with) running. I was worried about getting the same update for a while after seeing these posts, but now I’m not so sure.

15

IF the hue bridge emu has to run on port 80 - what happens to the HA UI? Doesn’t that run on 80?

16

The default port for ha is 8123

17

I’ve played around a little more with this, my google account is linked to the google home we have. Through google assistant on my pixel or google home settings in the home app I can connect to the emulated hue no problem. The issue seems to be with my wife’s phone’s google assistant. It is not paired with a google home so maybe google uses google home as a virtual bridge to enable communications with the emulated hue? That may explain why in the absence of a google home, setup requires that you link to a cloud account connected to a hue.

That said, I’m no closer to resolving the issue on her phone…

18

Yep, that’s how it works, Google Assistant commands go over the internet not your local network. The implication that you can do everything with Assistant now without a Home is not true.

19

I set up Emulated Hue on a fresh AiO install of Hass (on a RPi3) over the weekend.

Initially, when attempting to pair I was seeing the Philips Hue account message described above. After adding my host_id (IP address that HASS is running on) to the conf.yaml the pairing process worked perfectly.

My challenge now is trying to make the switch in HASS work when I give my Google Home the voice command (she says she’s done it, but the switch doesn’t activate in HASS)…

20

Could you elaborate a bit more on how you made this work? I think I have configured everything g correctly (port 80, included host_ip etc) but the Google Assistant app can never find my emulated hue.