Home Assistant Cloud Alternatives

You mean household profile? At the moment Alexa can add only one additional household account. If you have more than 2 Echos, there is no way you can link every accounts together. It makes the setup even more complicated.

The NR setups seems a bit clunky. If I have 100 devices, do I need recreate the devices in hardilllb cloud and then create 100 flows in my NR?

Told you I didn’t know how it worked :slight_smile:

As far as I can see, yes you would need to set it up for each device but you can copy and paste in NR so it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to do the lot…you did say time wasn’t a problem :+1:

Hang on, I did only mean add one account. So each Echo will have one unique account and one shared account, the unique handling the relevant devices and the one shared with all handling the multi room audio…or is that still not how it works?

@Bobby_Nobble, I don’t think it’s v3 since the commands don’t include entertainment-related functions, but it’s really impossible to know without asking or seeing the code for ourselves. I didn’t realize that it only worked with new Echo devices though, as I didn’t see that in the documentation.

I started down the HA route to eliminate or reduce my cloud dependence. I have 2 girls that use curling irons, space heaters and other hot stuff. I wanted to have those outlets shut down after x amount of time for safety reasons. I was relying on IFTTT and other services to do it before.

Now, I can shut off my external access and my automatons continue to work 100% greatly reducing health, life and safety issues. I expose everything I need to Alexa with either emulated hue or via other methods in HA.

I tried the new cloud, just because it was new. But I excluded exposing everything in the config and it still exposed all of my automations, groups, lights and switches to Alexa… PITA to delete them all one at a time from the Alexa app, will not try again unless something really compels me.

You still can forget all in the Alexa web app.

At the moment, the domain exclusion doesn’t work. I only use include_entities in the config to expose the devices I need.

Just chatted with hardillb (developer of Node-RED Alexa Home Skill Bridge). He said it is currently using v2 payload and needs to rewrite the skill completely to support v3. Unfortunately, it is not going to happen in the short term.

So it seems there is still no worthy alternatives for HA Cloud :disappointed:

no emotion on my side. Make it 1$ per month and (I think) 99% of the user will jump in

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The cloud component is just an AWS lambda function (which an Alexa Smart Home skill requires), and HA Cloud’s implementation of that can be found here.

Does anyone know if this will have the same effect (Or otherwise determine) anything for the Google Assistant?

It seems that HA Cloud is for Alexa skills first, but this is the functional same as Google Assistant integration.

Seeing as Google Assistant integration was recently added (0.56), is this something that will be migrated to HA cloud also? A self-hostable solution for this persisting alongside HA Cloud would be ideal.

Fair enough, sounded like it should given it has controls for some of the other devices that are supposed to be a v3 feature.

I would at that point… just because I might want to try it.

The positive that’s come out of them profiteering is the discussion it has generated looking at other solutions.

I, and I know many others, were unaware of what you could do with Node RED and lots of other interesting talk of what people have managed with a bit of lateral thinking.

If they’d charged a reasonable amount we’d all be none the wiser :rofl:

Knowing what open source projects are like there’s probably several clever buggers out there all working on porting the HA one to create a free version which may also be better than the original.

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I believe single Amazon account is what Amazon intended for multiple Echos in the same house. Even though the support for that is not yet perfect, but if we look back few months ago Alexa-enabled smart home group is not even available. Amazon is really focusing all their efforts in improving the smart home experience. They have to if they want to sell more Echos in a single house.

I’m looking forward for these new features for Alexa (I have sent them these feature requests)…

  1. Fan, AC and speaker to be supported in Alexa-enabled smart home group.
  2. More than 2 household profiles
  3. Link more than one Google Calendar
  4. Voice restriction for lists and reminders
  5. Family members can link their own Spotify account to their own voice or household profile in Alexa so that when they ask Alexa to play music, it won’t interrupted the music of other family members.
  6. Smart home devices to be included in the alarm (when alarm is triggered, it will play musics from Spotify and turn on bedroom lights, open the blind and start the coffee machine).

I have high hope that Amazon will implement all these within a year. I just have to be patient.

If you like these features as well, please submit your request to [email protected]. Hopefully the more people request it, the faster it will be implemented.

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Think where I’ve been lucky is all the not emulated_hue capable functions I’ve needed so far have been covered by other, usually manufacturer, Smart Home Skills and, because they are, everything acts like a whole with no trigger words, Hive heating for example. HA can report the state of everything and control it through the front end so the functions can be added into automations which don’t need any direct input so HA still appears to be fully integrated even if it’s not directly controlling it.

Mine is also nowhere near as involved as yours yet and the fact we don’t do AC over here, which seems to be one of the biggest problem areas for users, makes things much less painless.

Another thing I like about Node Red is the ability to “create aliases” with Alexa since you can have multiple Alexa names linked to the same flow. Not to mention create scenes triggering multiple sequences. It really is a must have for all HA users. Now I’m wondering how I didn’t see this before!

A small update on my haaska fork:
I’ve merged the few “safe” looking PRs from the original repo that mainly affected documentation, and added a direct link to the issue with instructions on how to get v2 working (which appears to still work for now). I haven’t added anything new yet.

Turns out there was an MIT License in haaska.py after all, so I’ve broken that out to a separate file for easy identification.

I’m still looking to rename it, so if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to comment here.

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Have realised my confusion, emulated_hue uses v1 which Dots and original Echos can still see, the new Echos can only discover V2 and newer. I’d assumed because the Echos were new it would just be the new one.

Thanks for finding this out. May I know how do you find it? Any article we can refer to?

It’s on here somewhere, I’ll see if I can find it but in essence the poster contacted Amazon directly to find out why something wasn’t working with his Show, from memory but more than likely emulated_hue, and was told they had ditched support for the version that uses on new products. Think what confused me was just talk of new and old protocols rather than brand new (v3), used to be new (v2) and old (v1).